Carbon recycling instead of plastic trash

Iron electrocatalysis breaks down polystyrene and delivers green hydrogen

14-Nov-2024 - Plastics are inescapable in our daily lives. The vast amounts of plastic garbage heaped in landfills and in the environment, however, are as problematic as the plastics are useful. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, a German research team has now introduced a new method for recycling polystyrene ...

New Insights into Ammonia Decomposition

How to make hydrogen transportable

10-Oct-2024 - Using ammonia is regarded as a promising method of transporting hydrogen. However, an efficient process is also needed to convert it back into hydrogen and nitrogen. An international research team has gained new insights into the mode of operation of an iron catalyst that can be used to split ...

Engineers develop general, high-speed technology to model, understand catalytic reactions

08-Aug-2024 - Researchers have been studying the industrial production of ammonia for a century. But they’ve struggled to find ways to improve the low-yield, low-efficiency process. Atmospheric nitrogen, with the aid of an iron catalyst, reacts with hydrogen to produce ammonia. That reaction produces lots of ...

Significant Breakthrough in Understanding of the Two-State Reactivity Mechanism

Scientists discovered first experimental methodology for measuring low-energy, spin-forbidden transitions in molecular catalysts

02-Jul-2024 - Iron-based catalysts are essential in various fields, including medicine, energy, and environmental science. They facilitate reactions that are vital for producing pharmaceuticals, clean fuels, and breaking down pollutants. These catalysts operate by enabling the directed transformation of ...

New iron catalyst could – finally! – make hydrogen fuel cells affordable

“We believe this is a significant breakthrough that will eventually help unleash the tremendous potential of hydrogen fuel cells”

11-Jul-2022 - For decades, scientists have been searching for a catalyst that dramatically reduces the cost of fabricating hydrogen fuel cells. Such an advancement could lead to a green power revolution, with everything from laptops to locomotives running on a fuel whose only byproduct is water. New research ...

Iron catalyst could make important chemical reactions cheaper and more eco-friendly

06-Jun-2022 - A catalyst is a key ingredient for many chemical reactions. It facilitates a molecule to change into another molecule, without being changed itself, meaning it can be used multiple times. However, many catalysts are made of precious metals, making them expensive and potentially harmful to the ...

"Magic" combination for more effective hydrogenations

The activity of this “magic” combination came as a real surprise

06-Jan-2022 - Hydrogen (H2) is the smallest chemical molecule and a beacon of hope for a more environmentally friendly energy transition in the coming years. In addition, it is already used in a variety of industrial processes - so-called hydrogenations - for the environmentally friendly production of chemical ...

A key to cheaper renewable fuels: keeping iron from rusting

Cheap and readily available element could be used for cost-effective biofuels conversion

21-Aug-2020 - Washington State University researchers have made a key first step in economically converting plant materials to fuels: keeping iron from rusting. The researchers have determined how to keep iron from rusting in important chemical reactions that are needed to convert plant materials to fuels, ...

Simplified synthesis

Researchers dramatically simplify and streamline organic chemical synthesis

01-Apr-2019 - For the first time researchers discovered a simple and highly efficient way to produce certain kinds of organic compounds. The team from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tokyo report their new method - which uses a novel iron catalyst - can not only simplify organic synthesis but ...

Reducing CO2 with common elements and sunlight

28-Jun-2018 - An international collaborative research group including Tokyo Institute of Technology, Universite PARIS DIDEROT, and CNRS has discovered that CO2 is selectively reduced to CO when a photocatalyst composed of an organic semiconductor material and an iron complex is exposed to visible light. They ...