Longer-lasting chemical catalysts
Friday, January 13, 2012 - 08:31
in Physics & Chemistry
Metal-based chemical catalysts have excellent green chemistry credentialsin principle at least. In theory, catalysts are reusable because they drive chemical reactions without being consumed. In reality, however, recovering all of a catalyst at the end of a reaction is difficult, so it is gradually lost. Now, chemists can retain, retrieve and reuse metal catalysts by trapping them with a polymer matrix, thanks to recent work by Yoichi Yamada at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute, Wako, Yasuhiro Uozumi at RIKEN and Japans Institute for Molecular Science and Shaheen Sarkar, also at RIKEN.