![]() “Our method does not require the application of any electrical voltage or form of radiation,” said Zare.įrom a broader chemistry perspective, the method is remarkable in that it uses three phases of matter: nitrogen as gas, water as liquid, and catalyst as solid. Zare and colleagues were very pleased with this result, especially in light of the relatively low-tech approach. Using a device called a mass spectrometer, Song analyzed the microdroplets’ characteristics and saw the signature of ammonia in the collected data. The sprayer blasted out microdroplets in which pumped water (H 2O) and compressed molecular nitrogen (N 2) reacted together in the presence of the catalyst. The researchers applied the catalyst to a graphite mesh that Song incorporated into a gas-powered sprayer. The catalyst consists of an iron oxide, called magnetite, and a synthetic membrane invented in the 1960s that is composed of repeating chains of two large molecules. ![]() The research team zeroed in on a catalyst – the term for any substance that boosts the rate of a chemical reaction but is not itself degraded or changed by the reaction – that they suspected could help blaze a chemical pathway toward ammonia. Chanbasha specializes in nanomaterials for energy, petrochemical and environment applications and came to Stanford as a visiting scholar last summer. Taking those findings further, Song and Zare began a collaboration with study co-author Basheer Chanbasha, a professor of chemistry at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia. ![]() In a 2019 study, Zare and colleagues novelly demonstrated that caustic hydrogen peroxide spontaneously forms in microdroplets in contact with surfaces.Įxperiments since have borne out a mechanism of electric charge jumping between the liquid and solid materials and generating molecular fragments, known as reactive oxygen species. The new chemistry discovered follows in the footsteps of pioneering work by Zare’s lab in recent years examining the long-overlooked and surprisingly high reactivity of water microdroplets. Xiaowei Song, a postdoctoral scholar in chemistry at Stanford, is the lead author of the study, published April 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The new method also uses little energy and at low cost, thus pointing a way forward to potentially producing the valuable chemical in a sustainable manner. ![]() “If this process can be scaled up, it would represent an eco-friendly new way of making ammonia, which is one of the most important chemical processes that takes place in the world.” We were shocked to see that we could generate ammonia in benign, everyday temperature-and-pressure environments with just air and water and using something as basic as a sprayer. Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and a professor of chemistry in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, said: In contrast, the innovative method debuted by the Stanford researchers requires less specialized circumstances. All told, to satisfy the current annual worldwide demand for 150 million metric tons of ammonia, the Haber-Bosch process gobbles up more than 2% of global energy and accounts for about 1% of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere.
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