Carbon-based materials have several qualities that make them attractive as catalysts for speeding up chemical reactions.
Carbon-based materials have several qualities that make them attractive as catalysts for speeding up chemical reactions. They are low-cost, lightweight and their high surface area provides a good scaffold on which to anchor catalysts, keeping them stable and dispersed far apart, while providing molecules a lot of surface area to work. This makes carbons useful for energy storage and sensors. Over the last 10 years, carbons have been used in electrochemistry to catalyze reactions to make chemicals and fuel cells.
However, in work recently reported in Nature Communications, University of Delaware’s Dion Vlachos and researchers in the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI), with collaborators from Brookhaven National Laboratory, made some surprising findings as they were developing techniques to better understand the role oxygen plays in how carbon-based catalysts perform.
According to Vlachos, what they found turned some of what they knew about chemistry upside down.
Not all oxygens are the same
Despite their utility, carbons are not well understood. They are not uniform either. Carbon materials sometimes have oxygen in them, and this oxygen can come in multiple different forms — as an alcohol, aldehyde, ketone or acid. One open question is what the oxygen in these carbon materials does.
Read more at University Of Delaware
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