One really tricky part of this is going to be that gallium alloys or otherwise attacks a LOT of metals including aluminum and steel. Still should be fine in glass or maybe there is a passivation trick that can prevent gallium attacking the surfaces.
Otherwise platinum on carbon (and now platinum/gallium alloy) can do lots of useful reactions mostly hydrogenations.
Pt/C and Pd/C can also do super neat hydrogen rearrangements. Fascinating catalysts. Though they like to catch fire when in contact with air, annoyingly.
> Surprisingly, it's actually the gallium that does the work of driving the desired chemical reaction, acting under the influence of platinum atoms in close proximity.
> Exciton Science Associate Investigator Dr. Andrew Christofferson of RMIT explained how novel these results are: "The platinum is actually a little bit below the surface and it's activating the gallium atoms around it. So the magic is happening on the gallium under the influence of platinum.
This is interesting and makes me wonder what other sorts of materials could act as more efficient catalysts when modified by the presence of small amounts of platinum. Could you, for instance, deposit a sparse layer of platinum covered by an atomic level thickness of some other material in the solid phase and achieve catalysis with the cheaper coating?
It makes me wonder about other impurities. If platinum can have one effect, maybe another can have the opposite.
Was this especially pure gallium? 99.99% is purer than you normally expect when you buy an ingot from the metal supplier, although the usual impurities are considered mostly harmless. (I.e. aluminum won't have any gallium.)
Unfortunately Sci-hub didn't have the paper, when I checked.
Interesting. I don't have access to the full text of the paper, but I'm surprised the platinum-doped gallium doesn't form a protective oxide shell, like pure gallium does. Perhaps this depends on having very small particles? Or does the platinum just stabilize the surface chemistry against oxidation?
Don't tell the homeopathic crowd about this. A tiny amount a potent expensive substance encouraging a change in behavior in a much larger quantity of a cheap substance would be like catnip to them.
Well it’s a liquid. My understanding of fuel cells is they need an ionic exchange membrane that the hydrogen nuclei pass through while the electrons do some work in a circuit to the other side. At the very least this gives us an idea of how being better able to search quantum interactions/“scenes” just might make a lot of technological impossible s suddenly possible.
Warning, I’m talking about stuff I know way too little about:
So I wonder whether being liquid makes this less helpful in a fuel cell. If I understand fuel cell chemistry enough, platinum would be on either side of the actual proton exchange membrane to form the anode and cathode. I see a liquid being problematic in that scenario as it would slosh around instead of making a circuit.
More helpful would be some sort of solid state of platinum (preferably something cheaper) on either side that conducted the electrons away to the poles.
But this definitely shows there’s interesting stuff to be found with these methods. Might just someday find that perfect fuel cell material.
Isn't electrolysis already readily served using traditional alkaline electrolyzers? At the very least there you have the tremendous advantage of needing zero rare materials; pretty much any developed country can manufacture their own alkaline electrolyzers.
Or even "trace platinum dissolved in liquid gallium". The solubility at "room temp" (40 ˚C is quite hot for a room) is only about ~50 ppm. It's kind of like calling sea water "room-temperature liquid sodium chloride".
Whinging about titles gets taken a little far here sometimes. From the article:
“But without the platinum there, it doesn't happen. This is completely different from any other catalysis anyone has shown, that I'm aware of. And this is something that can only have been shown through the modeling."
Likening this to sea water leaves a lot to be desired.
> This is completely different from any other catalysis anyone has shown, that I'm aware of
The part right before that is much more interesting. I quote
>> The platinum is actually a little bit below the surface and it's activating the gallium atoms around it. So the magic is happening on the gallium under the influence of platinum.
So the gallium is doing the catalysis, but only when a platinum atom is somewhere around the gallium - spooky action at a distance stuff.
With Gallium doing the work, that explains "why we need so little platinum" detail.
Yes, especially because the notable part is that the liquid mixture is acting as a catalyst in the same way that the solid platinum was.
"It's kind of like calling sea water "room-temperature liquid sodium chloride"." It would be extremely impressive if you could make sodium chloride thousands of times more potent by dissolving it in water.
> When combined with gallium, the platinum becomes soluble. In other words, it melts,
That's not what that word means, and the audience for this article probably knows the difference between "melt" and "dissolve". They could just describe the research as it actually is instead of trying to make it sound like something more amazing to get clicks.
D’oh, I might be a bit disillusioned by headlines of reporting on superconductor research - my initial reaction to the headline’s „at room temperature“ was „At which pressure?“
and it's gallium, known to dissolve a lot of other metals as well. Copper and stainless steel are no go - for gallium alloys are even more corrosive (than pure Ga). Nickel is likely ok - I suppose the properties of the Ga/Pt are rather unknown.
Mixing platinum with gallium lets you get some of the desirable catalyst properties of platinum; with less platinum and as a liquid at lower temperatures; i.e much cheaper.
Gallium is produced from the waste streams of Aluminum production (primarily at least), and a whole lot of it just isn't extracted and left as waste.
Platinum is quite a lot more valuable than gold, found in similar deposits, and rather rare. (you could say it is also produced from gold production waste streams and be mostly correct, it used to just be discarded long ago, but now it is very highly valued)
I'm not familiar with how pricing precious metals works, but it looks like, as of this moment, gold is priced about 2x more than platinum[1]! Presumably these prices have quite a bit of variability, and gold and platinum switch places sometimes? (Although your main point about gallium being _way_ cheaper than gold/platinum holds for sure.)
Ah, hm, updated knowledge. From about 1999 to 2008 platinum traded at about twice the price of gold. They were roughly equal until 2015 then gold started trading about double the price of platinum.
Platinum has quite a few industrial uses, gold is getting more attention as a store of value lately, probably lots of other more complex market forces going on as well.
“To create an effective catalyst, the researchers needed to use a ratio of less than 0.0001 platinum to gallium. And most remarkably of all, the resulting system proved to be over 1,000 times more efficient than its solid-state rival […] Using advanced computational chemistry and modeling, their colleagues at RMIT, led by Professor Salvy Russo, were able to identify that the platinum never becomes solid, right down to the level of individual atoms. […] "They were always separated by gallium atoms. There is no solid platinum forming in this system." […] Surprisingly, it's actually the gallium that does the work of driving the desired chemical reaction, acting under the influence of platinum atoms in close proximity.”
Oh dear Lord, maybe the homeopathic cranks have been on to something all along!
My naïve take is liquid phase is higher energy than solid phase. The gallium here actually keeps the little amount of platinum liquid by diluting those platinum atoms into gallium-surrounding the platinum so it can’t solidify. Thus the catalytic effects are more like a liquid platinum catalyst than solid. Neat trick that probably wasn’t obvious outside of new methods.
Edit-also note, this may be more like alchemy. They’re seeing the atoms on the surface performing the catalytic effect but the platinum resides below the surface. So the nearby platinum atoms are making the gallium mimic platinum properties.
Water has a density of 1 g/mL, most other fluids we ingest are close, but gallium weighs 5g per milliliter and platinum over 20 g/ml.
In purely mechanical considerations, 1000 ml of platinum would weigh 21.4 kg or almost 50 lbs. I'm not a doctor, but I imagine the stomach is not able to hold that much weight!
Quantum chemistry isn't well understood enough to definitely prove certain homeopathic right or wrong.
The people assuming it was all cranks and snake oil, were ironically also assuming things without justifications. Though likely most of it is cranks and snake oil.
Otherwise platinum on carbon (and now platinum/gallium alloy) can do lots of useful reactions mostly hydrogenations.