A Novel Nanobio Catalyst for Biofuels
(Argonne National Laboratory) Nanoparticles synthesized from noble metals such as ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, silver (Ag), osmium, iridium, platinum, and gold (Au) are attracting increased attention by researchers around the world looking for advances in such fields as biomedicine and catalysts.
Researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of South Carolina working at U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) facilities at Argonne including the Advanced Photon Source (APS), have been successful in synthesizing and characterizing monodisperse gold-core silver-shell nanoparticles utilizing a bio-template that has potential as a water soluble catalyst for converting biomass such as dead trees, branches and tree stumps, yard clippings, wood chips, and even municipal solid waste into fuels.
Noble metals are attractive avenues for this research because, for one thing, unlike base metals, they are corrosion-resistant when exposed to damp air.
Bimetallic core-shell catalysts, where one metal is at the center, i.e., the core, and the second is at the surface, or the shell, provide distinctive properties, often a better reactivity, because the core metal particle could modify the lattice strain of the shell metal, which results in a shift of the electronic band structure of the shell metal.
Such core-shell, nanometer-sized particles are being studied in most national labs and universities.
In the field of bioinorganic chemistry, the use of protein cage templates has been recently developed as a promising method for the synthesis of uniform-size metal nanoparticle catalysts. READ MORE Abstract
