Catalysts are essential materials in various industries, as they make they facilitate speed reactions required to make gasoline, clean vehicle exhaust, or produce pharmaceutical drugs. These catalysts are commonly containing precious metals, so using them is costly, making the manufacturing processes using catalysts to be unattractive, economically speaking. But the discovery of single atom structure paves that way to improved catalysts, a new class of these materials that is based on a precious metals’ single atom structures supported by a cheap material.
A team of scientists from Virginia Tech College of Engineering, headed by Ayman M. Karim and Hongliang Xin, discovered the structure of iridium single atom catalysts for carbon monoxide oxidation. This finding would eventually lead to improved and more cost-efficient catalysts, as the team of researchers reported on ScienceDaily recently.
The research, published in the Nature Catalysis journal and titled as “Identification of the Active Complex for CO Oxidation over Single- Atom Iron-MgAl2O4 Catalysts,” revealed that catalysts based on single atom structures are by 25 times than traditional catalysts.
Single Atom Structure Breakthrough Paves The Way To Improved Catalysts
“Seeing a single atom catalyst at work shows how a chemical reaction can be simple from afar, yet still complex to understand as we dive into the atomic level details. However, uncovering those details paves the way for designing more efficient catalysts,” explained Ayman M. Karim.
“This study provides very detailed atomic level information on the structure and activity of supported noble metal single atoms. We applied different characterization tools and quantum chemical calculations to show how a single atom catalyst works,” added Yubing Lu, a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech, who, along with Jiamin Wang, also a Ph.D. student at the same university, participated in the study.
In short, this single atom study breakthrough paves the way to improved catalysts, making the use of these materials both better and more cost-efficient.
