Chemical reactions are happening all around us all the time—obvious when you think about it, but how many of us do it when we start a car, boil an egg, or fertilize our lawn?
Chemical catalysis expert Richard Kong has been thinking about chemical reactions. In his work as a “professional sound engineer”, as he himself puts it, he is interested not only in the reactions that arise in himself, but also in provoking new ones.
As a Klarman Fellow in Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the College of Arts and Sciences, Kong works to develop catalysts that drive chemical reactions to desired outcomes, creating safe and even value-added products, including those that can have a positive impact on person. health. Wednesday.
“A significant amount of chemical reactions take place unaided,” Kong said, referring to the release of carbon dioxide when cars burn fossil fuels. “But more complex and complex chemical reactions don’t happen automatically. This is where chemical catalysis comes into play.”
Kong and his colleagues designed a catalyst to direct the reaction they wanted, and it happened. For example, carbon dioxide can be converted to formic acid, methanol, or formaldehyde by choosing the right catalyst and experimenting with the reaction conditions.
According to Kyle Lancaster, professor of chemistry and chemical biology (A&S) and professor of Kong, Kong’s approach fits well with the “discovery-driven” approach of Lancaster’s lab. “Richard had the idea of using tin to improve his chemistry, which was never in my script,” Lancaster said. “It’s a catalyst for the selective conversion of carbon dioxide into something more valuable, and carbon dioxide gets a lot of bad press.”
Kong and his collaborators recently discovered a system that, under certain conditions, can convert carbon dioxide into formic acid.
“While we are currently not close to state of the art reactivity, our system is highly configurable,” Kong said. “So we can begin to understand more deeply why some catalysts work faster than others, why some catalysts are inherently better. We can tune the parameters of the catalysts and try to understand what makes these things work faster, because the faster they work, the better – you can create molecules faster.”
As a Klarman Fellow, Kong is also working to convert nitrates, common fertilizers that seep toxically into waterways, from the environment into something harmless, he says.
Kong experimented with common earth metals such as aluminum and tin as catalysts. The metals are cheap, non-toxic and abundant in the earth’s crust, so using them won’t pose sustainability issues, he said.
“We’re also figuring out how to make catalysts where two of these metals interact with each other,” Kong said. “By using two metals in the framework, what kind of reactions and interesting questions can we get from bimetallic systems?” “chemical reaction?”
According to Kong, scaffolding is the chemical environment in which these metals reside.
For the past 70 years, the norm has been to use a single metal center to achieve chemical transformations, but in the last decade or so, chemists in the field have begun to explore synergistic interactions between two chemically bonded or contiguous metals. , Kong said, “It gives you more degrees of freedom.”
These bimetallic catalysts give chemists the ability to combine metal catalysts based on their strengths and weaknesses, Kong says. For example, a metal center that binds poorly to substrates but breaks bonds well can work with another metal center that breaks bonds poorly but bonds well to substrates. The presence of the second metal also affects the properties of the first metal.
”You can start to get what we call a synergistic effect between the two metal centers,” Kong said. “Some really unique and wonderful reactions are starting to emerge in the field of bimetallic catalysis.”
Kong said there is still a lot of uncertainty about how metals bond to each other in molecular forms. He was as excited by the beauty of the chemistry itself as he was by the results. Kong was brought to Lancaster’s laboratory for their expertise in X-ray spectroscopy.
“It’s a symbiosis,” Lancaster said. “X-ray spectroscopy helped Richard understand what was under the hood and what made tin especially reactive and capable of this chemical reaction. We benefit from his extensive knowledge of major group chemistry, which has opened up in a new field.”
It all comes down to basic chemistry and research, an approach made possible by the Open Klarman Fellowship, Kong said.
“Usually I can run the reaction in the lab or sit at the computer simulating the molecule,” he said. “We’re trying to get as complete a picture of chemical activity as possible.”