ERC Advanced Grant
Award year: 2017
Category: Scholarship / Grant
Type: ERC Advanced Grant
Awarding organization: Europäischer Forschungsrat (ERC)
Peter Wasserscheid’s research focuses on liquid metal catalysis in order to release hydrogen from organic molecules. These reaction accelerators or catalysts employ liquid drops of metal attached to porous carriers that are brought into contact with the reactants. The active sites of the reaction accelerators are single metal atoms that emerge from a ‘lake’ of gallium and disappear back into the liquid after their job is done. The unique dynamics of the liquid surface of the catalyst open up new perspectives for metal catalysis. What’s interesting, for example, is that individual atoms of metal surrounded by gallium have very unusual properties, which could enable expensive precious metals to be replaced by more cost-effective metals.