Use of novel materials for the development of sustainable catalysts

The project will investigate the use of novel catalyst supports and technologies that enable the incorporation of earth abundant transition metals into PGM nanoparticle catalysts. A primary aim of the project is to make PGM catalysis more sustainable. We plan to achieve that through amelioration of PGM nanoparticles using iron and copper metal centres. We will investigate Fe(0)/Fe(II) and Cu(I)/Cu(II) salts for this purpose. The use of paramagnetic metal centres will allow PGM nanoparticle catalysts to be recovered and reused. Moreover, we anticipate that these earth abundant metals will alter and improve PGM catalyst efficiency, enabling lower PGM catalyst loadings to be used for the betterment of sustainable chemical synthesis applications and processes.