A recent paper by William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Associate Professor Omar Abdelrahman and Graduate Research Assistant and Ph.D. Candidate Atharva Burte, published in ACS Catalysis, has been featured in Chemistry World Magazine.
In “Programmable Chemical Sensitivities Scale with Extent of Reaction Instead of Time,” Abdelrahman and Burte set aside previous notions of catalyst operation — in which catalysts work at fixed, steady pace — in favor of a new approach that “rapidly flips the energy of a catalyst back and forth periodically with time, using stimuli like electric voltage or temperature spikes, which speed up the rate at which the catalyst works by up to 120 times faster.”
The end result is greater than the mean of its parts; that is, the benefit is more than simply averaging time spent in each state.
“We discovered that time isn’t what matters most; instead, it’s the progress of the chemical reaction itself. This new blueprint fundamentally changes how we understand and design ultra-fast, programmable chemical reactions,” they said.
Catalysts for a variety of crucial chemical reactions, from fertilizer production to the reduction of emissions via catalytic conversion on personal vehicles, tend to be made of expensive metals such as platinum, silver and gold. This newly-developed framework, however, can ultimately also be applied to light, mechanical stress, electricity or virtually any energetic stimulus, and could “dramatically accelerate technologies vital to American chemical manufacturing and the energy industry.”
“We wanted to dive into the fundamental kinetics behind this phenomenon because solving that puzzle is the key to designing entirely new and more efficient chemical systems,” added Abdelrahman and Burte. “Our study showed that flipping the catalyst’s environment actually forces the entire chemical reaction to take a different, much faster pathway than it normally would. We intend to use this as a launch pad to experimentally investigate the effect of time scales on this shift in the dominant pathway.”
One of the study’s most surprising discoveries involved its model reaction: formic acid electrooxidation.
“In chemistry, this is considered a one-way street — a highly irreversible reaction. But when we started shaking up the environment at incredibly high frequencies, we realized we actually managed to switch the reaction’s direction, essentially turning a one-way chemical street into a two-way chemical street,” they said. “It proves that this new framework isn’t just a niche trick; it’s a universal rulebook that can completely redefine how different materials and chemical reactions behave.”