When one considers nonrenewable resources, the first to come to mind are fossil fuels: petroleum, coal, and natural gas. The rapid depletion of these unsustainable resources has sparked global research on renewable-energy technologies, such as fuel cells, electrolyzers, and lithium-air batteries. Unfortunately there is a common unsustainable thread that links these burgeoning technologies: a dependence on platinum-group metals (PGMs). These elements — platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, ruthenium, and osmium — are the six least-abundant in the Earth’s lithosphere, yet are the most stable and active catalysts. Even with efficient recycling, numerous studies have indicated that the Earth simply does not contain enough PGMs to support a global renewable-energy economy. Thus, PGMs can be considered unsustainable resources that are currently needed to enable renewable energy technologies. MIT graduate student Sean Hunt, postdoc Tarit Nimmandwudipong, and Yuriy Román, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, have an idea for how to replace PGMs with metals that are more plentiful. In a paper published recently in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the team explained its process of synthesizing these alternative catalysts. “Because the PGMs tend to be the most active and stable catalysts in virtually all relevant thermal and electrocatalytic processes, our research sought to answer an exciting question,”
The post Engineering earth-abundant catalysts that mimic platinum in renewable energy technologies has been published on Technology Org.
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