Platinum Nanoparticles

 

Platinum is a noble metal. It can create useful catalysts to speed up chemical reactions. This is especially true during hydrogenation. (The process of adding hydrogen atoms to a molecule.) 

Professor Bruce Gates is from the UC Davis Department of chemical engineering. He is studying platinum catalyst that are highly efficient and stable during chemical reactions. 

The team published their works in nature chemical engineering.

Works tested in the past have shown that platinum that is arranged in clusters of atoms makes a more efficient hydrogenation catalyst than single platinum atoms. This is true for every larger nano particle of platinum. The smaller clusters tend to want to dump into larger particles. This creates a loss in efficiency. 

Yizhen Chen is from the Gates catalyst research group. He used an idea from Jingyue Liu, from Arizona State University. Chen planned to “trap” platinum clusters on a tiny island of cerium oxide.  The island is supported on a silica surface and each island then becomes its own chemical reactor.

Gates, Chenn and the team have shown that they can create these clusters. They have shown that the clusters have good catalytic activity in hydrogenation of ethylene. The team also found the clusters were stable, even under severe reaction conditions.

In the future, these metal clusters could create stable catalyst for the growing chemical industry.