Liquid platinum at room temperature: possible revolution in industrial chemistry
phys.org
phys.org
Otherwise platinum on carbon (and now platinum/gallium alloy) can do lots of useful reactions mostly hydrogenations.
> Exciton Science Associate Investigator Dr. Andrew Christofferson of RMIT explained how novel these results are: "The platinum is actually a little bit below the surface and it's activating the gallium atoms around it. So the magic is happening on the gallium under the influence of platinum.
This is interesting and makes me wonder what other sorts of materials could act as more efficient catalysts when modified by the presence of small amounts of platinum. Could you, for instance, deposit a sparse layer of platinum covered by an atomic level thickness of some other material in the solid phase and achieve catalysis with the cheaper coating?
Was this especially pure gallium? 99.99% is purer than you normally expect when you buy an ingot from the metal supplier, although the usual impurities are considered mostly harmless. (I.e. aluminum won't have any gallium.)
Unfortunately Sci-hub didn't have the paper, when I checked.
1. Mix a tiny amount of echinacea into gallium
2. Drink
3. Medical bills are gone forever because you are dead
So I wonder whether being liquid makes this less helpful in a fuel cell. If I understand fuel cell chemistry enough, platinum would be on either side of the actual proton exchange membrane to form the anode and cathode. I see a liquid being problematic in that scenario as it would slosh around instead of making a circuit.
More helpful would be some sort of solid state of platinum (preferably something cheaper) on either side that conducted the electrons away to the poles.
But this definitely shows there’s interesting stuff to be found with these methods. Might just someday find that perfect fuel cell material.
Does it have military applications?
“But without the platinum there, it doesn't happen. This is completely different from any other catalysis anyone has shown, that I'm aware of. And this is something that can only have been shown through the modeling."
Likening this to sea water leaves a lot to be desired.
But in theory it could be a competition to build up, rather than tear down, things that most commenters don’t know jack shit about anyways.
C’est la vie.
"It's kind of like calling sea water "room-temperature liquid sodium chloride"." It would be extremely impressive if you could make sodium chloride thousands of times more potent by dissolving it in water.
“Precious metal homeopathy”
The part right before that is much more interesting. I quote
>> The platinum is actually a little bit below the surface and it's activating the gallium atoms around it. So the magic is happening on the gallium under the influence of platinum.
With Gallium doing the work, that explains "why we need so little platinum" detail.
Actual paper here - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-022-00965-6
The specific catalysis they're doing is "electrochemical methanol oxidation", so I assume this is a direct Methanol fuel cell catalyst.
> When combined with gallium, the platinum becomes soluble. In other words, it melts,
That's not what that word means, and the audience for this article probably knows the difference between "melt" and "dissolve". They could just describe the research as it actually is instead of trying to make it sound like something more amazing to get clicks.
Not if they watched The Wizard of Oz as children.
Mixing platinum with gallium lets you get some of the desirable catalyst properties of platinum; with less platinum and as a liquid at lower temperatures; i.e much cheaper.
Is gallium significantly cheaper than platinum?
Edit: For actual values (per gram), Gallium ~0.50 USD, Platinum ~33.22 USD
Platinum is quite a lot more valuable than gold, found in similar deposits, and rather rare. (you could say it is also produced from gold production waste streams and be mostly correct, it used to just be discarded long ago, but now it is very highly valued)
Platinum has quite a few industrial uses, gold is getting more attention as a store of value lately, probably lots of other more complex market forces going on as well.
Oh dear Lord, maybe the homeopathic cranks have been on to something all along!
Water has a density of 1 g/mL, most other fluids we ingest are close, but gallium weighs 5g per milliliter and platinum over 20 g/ml.
In purely mechanical considerations, 1000 ml of platinum would weigh 21.4 kg or almost 50 lbs. I'm not a doctor, but I imagine the stomach is not able to hold that much weight!
https://yesdirt.com/is-gallium-toxic/
Some compounds of it may have medical uses, though: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2898053/
That said, people have swallowed even crazier things, like when they used to use mercury (!!!) as a laxative:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/following-lewi...
Edit-also note, this may be more like alchemy. They’re seeing the atoms on the surface performing the catalytic effect but the platinum resides below the surface. So the nearby platinum atoms are making the gallium mimic platinum properties.
> When on the order of one dopant atom is added per 100 million atoms, the doping is said to be low or light.
The people assuming it was all cranks and snake oil, were ironically also assuming things without justifications. Though likely most of it is cranks and snake oil.