Originally posted December 29, 2010
Solid-state Catalysts and Cooking Chemistry
December 29, 2010
I suppose it’s that time of year. Time to reflect on the past year, and Lord knows, there is plenty to be thankful for. Instead of looking back and thinking about what I’d like to do differently, today I’m going to look forward and talk about some of the things that I’m going to focus on in the coming year. Selfishly, some of the topics in chemistry that I am going to be thinking about the most are also the ones I’ll be lecturing on in the coming year! (And out of these topics, my blogging will concentrate on the ones I know the least about.) But, I hope that you’ll find them as interesting as I do.
Solid-state Catalysis
A lot has been made of chemical catalysis this year. (A catalyst makes a chemical reaction easier. It does not undergo any permanent changes during the reaction.) The 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for research on palladium cross coupling catalysts. For Heck, Negishi and Suzuki palladium doesn’t refer to a solid chunk of metal but rather to a palladium(II) acetate (or similar) molecule in the reaction mixture. (Reactions based on small molecule catalysis also was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.) A good small molecule catalyst is valuable because it can enable the most precise reactions that let chemists treat molecules like tinker-toys. However the absolute quantity of material that one can produce with a small-molecule catalyst is somewhat low. Academic chemists love to study these catalysts because they are easy to manipulate and straightforward to analyze. (Italics mine and meant to indicate that easy and straightforward are entirely relative.)
In contrast to small molecule catalysts are solid-state catalysts. Derek Lowe covered some of the finer points of solid-phase research in a recent post. And, I’d like to echo some of these points here as I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while. Solid-phase catalysts are the main driver for industrial production of polymers, ammonia, and other commodity chemicals. These catalysts are responsible for making millions of tons of materials every year. As opposed to the small-molecule catalysts, which may look like this, solid-state catalysts consist of large chunks of minerals or ores or metals. The solid-phase catalysts are inherently much more difficult to study. The surface of these materials are responsible for the reactions that they assist. (Gerhard Ertl received the Nobel Prize in 2007 for his work studying processes at solid-phase catalyst surfaces.) As one can imagine, directed refining of these materials is nearly impossible and it’s really hard to get a handle on the precise reactions that are going on. It’s also equally as difficult to design new catalysts to be more effective than the old ones. (How can you improve on an old material if you don’t know exactly why the old material is good in the first place?) That being said, solid-phase catalysts are almost certainly going to be responsible for bringing us economically viable solar energy, CO2 remediation technologies, and many other new advances in industrial-scale chemistry. It is precisely because these materials are so important and because I understand them so little (ugh .. and I have to teach this topic in my Inorganic course this semester) that I want to focus on them so much.
Any readers out there who may have a good starting point for me … please feel free.
Cooking Chemistry
The second topic might not seem so dry to many of you! I am also teaching the general education chemistry course for our department and have decided to lecture on the chemistry of food and cooking. (Seriously, I am looking forward to this. I love chemistry. I love food. And, I love cooking. How can this go wrong?) Because I am developing this course from scratch, I have a lot of work to do to get my lectures ready every week. Therefore, much like the students in my class, you are going to be my guinea pigs. Likely what is going to happen is that I’m going to cover a broad range of things in a single one hour fifteen minute period. I’m going to be fascinated by a single topic from this lecture. I’m going to wish I could have talked about it more. I’m going to write about these food/chemistry obsessions for this blog. For example, during my first class, I’m going to talk about (and make) caramel. How fantastic is caramel. It’s butter. It’s sugar. It’s delicious! But, really, how do butter and sugar turn into caramel? How much do we know about the actual chemical reactions going on here? These are the kinds of things that I’m planning on writing about in the coming year.
I’ll be using several primary sources for this book aside from some of my general chemistry texts. Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking is the first, and arguably the best, popular book detailing the science of food preparation. I’ll also be using The Science of Cooking and Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food. For a more science-y view on things, I’ll be using Food Chemistry and Atkins’ Molecules. So … get a head start on my posts.
I hope you guys are going to enjoy this stuff as much as me!!
-mrh