Every year, catalysts are used in the manufacture of hundreds of billions of pounds worth of products ranging from ammonia and catalytic converters to margarine and pharmaceuticals. 

But as Alexandre explains, while catalysts are big business we're only a little way down the road in our understanding of their properties and potential.

"Catalysts are reagents that accelerate chemical reactions but are not consumed by them. That sounds simple but it is an extremely complex field. Unravelling those complexities will help us tackle more effectively than ever before some really big issues such as how to generate cheap renewable energy, protect the environment, minimise waste and develop benign processes for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries," says Alexandre.

"This is what we are attempting to do through a major EPSRC-funded project called CASTech, Catalytic Advances through Sustainable Technologies. It involves chemists, chemical engineers and physicists here and at the universities of Cambridge, Birmingham and Virginia (USA) working closely with a range of industrial partners to apply fundamental knowledge to specific industrial applications.

"Through this research we are gaining new knowledge about how catalysts are composed, how and why they work the way they do, and how they can be specially tailored to produce the most beneficial results.

"One example of CASTech's synergistic approach is a collaborative project with industry to design and develop next generation gold-based catalysts for the production of clean hydrogen for use in fuelThe end result of our collective efforts is that we have developed the most advanced piece of equipment of its kind. cells.

"The fundamental knowledge we are creating has applications in many other areas. One major challenge, for example, is how we can make best use of the huge quantities of naturally occurring methane gas that exist around the planet.

"We can't do this at the moment because gas is very difficult  and very expensive to transport, however, we are hoping that our work may one day lead to the development of new catalysts for use in new, highly efficient processes to convert methane in situ directly into a useable liquid fuel.

"This would make transportation a lot more cost effective but it has not yet been achieved. That's because the process involved is an extremely complex one in which the catalytic reaction has to be controlled very precisely otherwise the end product is water and carbon dioxide instead of methanol. 

"Developing the types of innovative catalysts we need to do this will only be possible once we have new tools to enable us to explore them at the most fundamental levels.

"As part of our work we have developed some of the most advanced spectroscopic instruments available in this field of research. We are also making use of synchrotron radiations light source facilities across Europe. In this way we are pioneering new methods of finding out what happens at the molecular level on the surfaces of catalysts for gas and liquid reagents in specific types of very fast catalytic reactions.

"This work is giving us important new insights which we are confident will bring us closer to harnessing the full potential of these vitally important substances."

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