High-efficiency catalytic reaction of liquid platinum at room temperature

Australian researchers have used trace amounts of liquid platinum to generate cheap and efficient chemical reactions at low temperatures, opening up new avenues for dramatic emissions reductions in key industries
.
When combined with liquid gallium, the small amount of platinum required for the reaction promises to provide more sustainable solutions for carbon dioxide emission reduction, ammonia synthesis in fertilizer production, green fuel cell manufacturing, and many other possible chemical applications
.

Platinum is a very effective catalyst, but it is not widely used on an industrial scale due to its high price
.
Most catalytic systems involving platinum also have high energy costs for continued operation
.
Typically, platinum has a melting point of about 1700°C, and when it is used in industrial form in solid state, about 10% platinum is required in a carbon-based catalytic system
.
This percentage of platinum is extremely costly when manufacturing components and products for commercial sale
.

Now, researchers at the University of New South Wales and RMIT University in Australia have found a way to produce a powerful reaction using even trace amounts of platinum
.

The researchers combined platinum with liquid gallium, which has a melting point of just 29.
8°C, which is about room temperature on a hot day
.
When platinum is combined with gallium, platinum becomes soluble
.
This mechanism only requires high temperature treatment in the initial stage, when platinum is dissolved in gallium to form the catalytic system
.
Even so, the temperature for an hour or two was only around 300°C, well below the sustained high temperatures typically required in industrial-scale chemical engineering
.

To make an effective catalyst, the researchers needed to use a platinum to gallium ratio of less than 0.
0001
.
Most notably, the resulting system proved to be more than 1,000 times more efficient than its solid-state competitor, which requires roughly 10 percent more expensive platinum to work
.

Also, because it is a liquid based system, it is also more reliable
.
Solid-state catalytic systems eventually clog and stop working
.
And the new liquid mechanism is "like a water feature with a built-in fountain" that is constantly renewed, self-regulating its effectiveness over a long period of time, preventing catalysis from accumulating on the surface like pond scum
.

The mechanism is also general enough to perform both oxidation and reduction reactions
.

Using advanced computational chemistry and modeling techniques, the researchers also demonstrated that during chemical reactions, platinum never becomes a solid, it is always dispersed in gallium in atomic form
.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Chemistry on the 6th
.
By extending this approach, liquid metal catalysts may have more than 1,000 possible elemental combinations for as many as 1,000 different reactions
.