Carbon dioxide and methane are the most significant greenhouse gases resulting pollution. Reusing them could reduce the threat to the world’s ecosystem.
Carbon dioxide and methane can be activated to experience compound responses with each other to make syngas. Syngas is a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which can be used to synthesize a variety of liquid fuels or ammonia.
In addition, the reaction between CO2 and methane has not fully scaled up. It because of unavailability of an inexpensive and industrially viable catalyst to speed up chemical reactions.
So to make up catalyst from cheap metals, scientists have patented a technology. They mainly involved metals like nickel, cobalt, magnesium, and aluminum. Through this technology, scientists actually wanted to make the powder form into a sphere-shaped catalyst, which is easier to handle in industrial operations.
To develop this, scientists used commercially available aluminum-oxide spheres. They then applied them with ‘layers’ of the catalyst metals. They also made several sets of the catalyst using different techniques to impregnate them with solutions of salt forms of the metals in order to study which technique gave the best results.
After that scientists used X-ray absorption spectroscopy. Through this, they were able to identify which procedures for impregnating the spheres created the best characteristics of an industrial catalyst at an atomic level.
Professor Hui Wang said, “Without the CLS we couldn’t have been able to fully understand this.”