Caltech student fathers breakthrough in green chemistry (a new, potassium-based, catalyst) [View all]

[OKIsItJustMe]

(Please note: NASA material. Copyright concerns are nil.)

http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2273/

[font face=Serif]News | April 21, 2015

[font size=5]Caltech student fathers breakthrough in green chemistry[/font]

By Bob Silberg,
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

[font size=3]Of what use is a newborn baby? This rhetorical question, variously attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday and Thomas Edison, is meant to suggest that a novel discovery or invention whose ultimate utility is not yet known should be viewed as a bouncing bundle of potential.

Along these lines, the eight-minute video Element 19 can be considered a sort of birth announcement. It heralds what Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute, which produced the video and funded the work it describes, calls a breakthrough in sustainable chemistry.

The baby in this metaphor is a catalyst that, unlike its cousins that pervade modern industry, is based not on precious metals like gold and platinum, but rather on something you can get out of a banana: potassium. The father (or perhaps more accurately if we ignore the gender problem, the mother) is a Caltech grad student named Anton Toutov, who reports that the delivery was long and difficult.

This new technology is already capable of manufacturing chemicals used in pharmaceuticals, agriculture and cosmetics in a much more environmentally friendly way than traditional methods. The catalyst requires little or no processing with petrochemicals and operates at much lower temperatures than standard catalytic methods, both of which keep its carbon footprint tiny. It can reduce air pollution from certain kinds of transportation fuels and, unlike the precious-metal processes it replaces, it produces no toxic waste. But like a baby, its ultimate accomplishments may be yet to come.

…

[font size=4]Unleashing minds[/font]

So what, exactly, is happening in this reaction? No one knows.

“It's really powerful and we have no idea how it works,” Toutov said. “It's a new way of moving atoms around. We don't know why they're moving around the way that they are, but they seem to be induced in some way by this potassium catalyst.”

“It is clear that the mechanism of how this is all happening is really very different than the way we've been classically thinking about these sorts of problems,” said Caltech professor Brian Stoltz who, along with Grubbs, has been serving as an advisor to Toutov and his team. “And I think that is the most eye-opening aspect of it. It's going to unleash people's minds and have them think about solving hard problems in very, very different ways. I think that's going to lead to a lot of new outcomes.”

In the video, Toutov puts it this way: “We thought that only precious metals are able to do these very challenging chemical reactions. Turns out that’s not true. Turns out nature figured this out millions of years ago, and we’re only now starting to catch up.”

…[/font][/font]