Cheap and abundant chemical outperforms precious metals as a catalyst

A team of Caltech chemists has discovered a method for producing a group of silicon-containing organic chemicals without relying on expensive precious metal catalysts. Instead, the new technique uses as a catalyst a cheap, abundant chemical that is commonly found in chemistry labs around the world—potassium tert-butoxide—to help create a host of products ranging from new medicines to advanced materials. And it turns out that the potassium salt is more effective than state-of-the-art precious metal complexes at running very challenging chemical reactions.

Read the whole article on Physorg

More from Physorg