Platinum Metals Review - Volume 44, Issue 1, 2000

The fabrication of nanostructured materials, such as nanometre-sized particles and wires, which are potential building blocks for tailored metal catalysts and electronic devices, is a major challenge currently being investigated. During the last ten years, “ship-in-bottle” catalyst technology using zeolitic crystals as microsized reactors for the template fabrication of metal clusters, nanoparticles and wires has been developed. This novel technology for cluster manipulation gives an ordered basis for better control of particle size, metal compositions and morphology. A variety of platinum metals carbonyl clusters has been synthesised, extracted and characterised, and transformed into nanoparticles and nanowires encapsulated in micro/mesoporous cavities and channels. The resulting nanostructured platinum metals exhibit higher catalytic performances and stabilities for various catalytic reactions as well as having unique magnetic properties, compared with conventional metals. An overview of this technology and recent developments resulting in excellent catalyst performances are described.

Combinatorial catalysis is becoming a significant method for investigating the activities of large numbers of potential catalysts. A very important prerequisite for making use of combinatorial catalysis research is a reliable, fast and efficient technique for monitoring the catalytic activities. Emissivity-corrected infrared thermography, which monitors the heat changes resulting from the heat of reaction on catalyst surfaces, is such a technique. In this article we describe emissivity-corrected infrared thermography and demonstrate its performance, over time, in monitoring the catalytic activities of catalyst libraries. It is shown that not only can static relative activity be displayed, but also that catalyst-specific time-dependent properties, such as activation and deactivation phenomena can be demonstrated.