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Aaron Sadow, from Ames National Laboratory and Iowa State University, has led a team of scientists to invent a new type of catalyst. This special catalyst can help transform regular materials like motor oil, plastic bags, water or milk bottles, caps and natural gas into more recyclable and eco-friendly substances.
The new catalyst is created to add special parts called functional groups onto hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are made completely of just hydrogen and carbon and usually don’t mix with water. But, when the special parts (functional groups) are added to hydrocarbon chains, it can change how the material behaves and even make it easier to reuse.
Professor Sadow explained that methane in natural gas is made up of only carbon and hydrogen (CH) molecules connected together, while oils and polymers have many carbon atoms linked with carbon-carbon (CC) bonds.
Aliphatic hydrocarbons are an important part of many petroleum products like plastic and motor oil. These materials can’t break down easily because they don’t have any additional components called functional groups. Scientists want to be able to take these basic chemicals and add or change elements, like oxygen, in order to make new materials.
Normally, to add atoms to hydrocarbon chains, a lot of energy is needed. We need to break down petroleum into small pieces first, then use those parts to build longer chains, and finally adding the desired atoms at the end. However, this new process allows us to convert already existing hydrocarbons into something else without breaking them down and at low temperatures.
Sadow’s team was trying to come up with a new way to process hydrocarbons without breaking any CC bonds. They figured out that, depending on the size and properties of the hydrocarbon, they might be able to just transfer the chains from the catalyst to aluminum and then add air to add functional groups. This would make it much easier than before!
Sadow says that to make the catalyst, they connected a cheap zirconium chemical found in nature to another inexpensive one – silica-alumina. These materials can be easily found on earth, and using them is helpful for any future commercial projects.
Using aluminum and zirconium is great for the environment and cost-effective. Aluminum is really common on Earth, and when using it to react, no waste is created. Plus, the catalyst used with it (zirconium alkoxide) also doesn’t need a lot of care – you can work with it easily without any air sensitivity problems.
We are researching chemistry that could make plastics stronger and easier to color. By studying this chemistry more we think we will be able to change the physical properties of different plastics. That’s how we hope to help them become even better!
Dr. Sadow gave credit to iCOUP for the success of this project due to its collaborative nature. Scientists from Ames National Lab, Cornell University, and Argonne National Lab all contributed to the research by studying things like catalyst structures which was done with an NMR spectroscopy, examining the structure and physical properties of different polymers, and statistically modeling various polymer functionalization techniques. Dr. Sadow concluded that this job was successful because it showed how much a whole group of experts can do when they work together as one team.
This article talks about how using a certain material called Zirconium can help to change some things like polyolefins (plastics), paraffins (oils) and methane (gas). It was written by Uddhav Kanbur, Alexander L. Paterson, Jessica Rodriguez and other scientists in January 2023 and published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The work has been in the spotlight of JACS, a news channel, going by the title “A Versatile New Tool for Making Commodity Chemicals”.
