“What makes the catalyst so efficient is that the palladium atom can move within the cavity to adapt to the process requirements while remaining trapped inside,” explains ETH Professor Javier Pérez-Ramírez. The palladium atom is shown in green. (Visualisations: ETH Zurich / Edvin Fako)
The chemical industry produces not just valuable vitamins, pharmaceuticals, flavours and pesticides, but often a large amount of waste, too. This is particularly true of pharmaceutical and fine-chemical production, where the volume of desired product may be just a fraction of the volume of waste and unsaleable by-products of synthesis.
One reason for this is that many chemical reactions make use of catalysts in dissolved form, as Javier Pérez-Ramírez, Professor of Catalysis Engineering, says. Catalysts are substances that accelerate a chemical reaction. In the case of dissolved catalysts, it often takes a huge amount of effort to separate them from the solvent and from the reaction products for reuse. Catalysts in solid form avoid this problem altogether.
Pérez-Ramírez and his group have now collaborated with other European scientists and an industry partner to develop just such a solid catalyst for a major chemical reaction, as the researchers report in the magazine
Nature Nanotechnology
. Their catalyst is a molecular lattice composed of carbon and nitrogen atoms (graphitic carbon nitride) that features cavities of atomic dimensions into which the researchers placed palladium atoms.
Efficient catalyst for a Nobel-prizewinning reaction
By making tiny particles of this palladium-carbon-nitrogen material, the scientists were able to show that it catalyses what is known as the Suzuki reaction very efficiently. “In chemistry, forming a bond between two carbon atoms is often done using the Suzuki reaction,” says Sharon Mitchell, a scientist in Pérez-Ramírez’s lab. It was this reaction that won Japanese scientist Akira Suzuki and two colleagues the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2010.
