Science and Technology Daily Beijing, May 29 (reporter Liu Xia) According to the physicists organization network reported on the 28th, researchers in the United States have found a new technology that can increase the catalytic speed of chemical reactions to 10,000 times the existing catalytic speed limit, which is expected to greatly improve the speed of thousands of chemical processes and significantly reduce costs. The fertilizer, food, fuel, plastics and other industries benefit.

Scientists use catalysts (such as metals) to speed up chemical reactions, but only as fast as Sabatier's principle allows. Since this criterion was established quantitatively in 1960, the Sabatier maximum has been the limit of catalytic speed.

Researchers at the Catalytic Energy Innovation Center, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, have found that they can break this speed limit by applying a wave to a catalyst, creating an oscillating catalyst. Waves have peaks and troughs, and when applied, the waves allow the two parts of a chemical reaction to proceed alone, at different speeds. When the waves applied to the surface of the catalyst match the natural frequency of the chemical reaction, a mechanism called "resonance" causes the catalytic rate to rise significantly.

co-author Paul Dornhahl, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of Minnesota, said: "We've long realized that catalysts need to change over time, and it turns out that moving to a frequency of kilohertz significantly speeds up catalysis."

Increasing the speed of chemical reactions would greatly benefit thousands of chemical and material technologies used to develop fertilizers, food, fuels, plastics and more, significantly reducing the amount of equipment needed to make them and lowering the overall cost of many everyday materials, the researchers said. "This has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost all of our most basic chemicals, materials and fuels, and the shift from conventional to dynamic catalysts will be as big as the shift from direct current to alternating current," said Professor Donis Vilakos, director of the Catalytic Energy Innovation Center.

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