“Tameable” molecules for more sustainable catalysis: Chemists synthesize surprising gallium compound

Dr. Tobias Rüffer holds a Petri dish filled with metallic gallium, which melts at about 30°C. Photo by Jakob Müller
Catalysts play a key role in the manufacture of many products we encounter in our daily lives, for example in cleaning car exhaust gases or in the chemical industry producing fertilizer. Catalysts ensure that these reactions take place with low energy consumption and as few side reactions as possible.
Conventional catalysts are based on rare and expensive precious metals such as iridium and rhodium, which pollute the environment. “To make production processes more sustainable, it is highly desirable to replace precious metal catalysts with less toxic alternatives such as main group metals,” says Professor Robert Kretschmer, Chair of the Department of Inorganic Chemistry at Chemnitz University of Technology.
Using aluminum and gallium as substitutes for precious metals has several advantages: “They are among the most abundant metals in the Earth’s crust, they are cheap, non-toxic and have unique chemical properties,” says the Chemnitz chemistry professor.
Unfortunately, the catalytic concepts developed for precious metals cannot be directly applied to more readily available elements, so the development of new methods to enable the use of elements such as aluminum and gallium as catalysts is a global research goal.
Scientists from the Chemnitz Department of Inorganic Chemistry have for the first time observed a reaction of gallium compounds that was previously only known for expensive metals.
“We have produced an unusual compound in which a gallium atom is bound to only one carbon atom,” explains Kretschmer. Such compounds are so rare that only a few research groups worldwide are able to “control” such molecules in the laboratory.
The findings are published in the journal Nature Synthesis. A research abstract describing the study has also been published in the same journal.
The reactivity of this new compound is particularly striking: “Gallium usually tries to increase the number of bonds in a reaction, but for the first time our team has succeeded in reacting in which the metal has only one bond at the end, but the gallium atom has jumped over two more carbon atoms,” Kretschmer says.
These so-called insertion reactions play an important role in many industrial syntheses, and the observations open up prospects for further development of the catalysts.
Further information: Simon HF Schreiner et al. “Single-bonded galandiyls with redox-active and redox-inactive reactivity.” Nature Synthesis (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s44160-024-00639-w
Gallium(I) compounds with variable reactivity, Nature Synthesis (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s44160-024-00653-y
Courtesy of Chemnitz University of Technology
Citation: “Tameable” molecules for more sustainable catalysts: Chemists succeed in synthesizing stunning gallium compound (September 26, 2024) Retrieved September 26, 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2024-09-molecules-sustainable-catalysts-chemists-succeed.html
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