• Question: how are catalysts made?

    Asked by logyboags to Shuo, Alan on 5 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Alan McCue

      Alan McCue answered on 5 Mar 2018:


      There are a lot of different ways you can made a catalyst. Basically there are two types of catalysts. Ones which dissolve and ones which are solid (I won’t use the technical terms). An example of a solid catalyst is platinum spread out onto a solid like aluminium oxide. A good way to think about this is like spreading out butter on a piece of toast. So you need to think about different ways to do this. One good analogy would be dying a piece of clothing. I take a dye, dissolve or mix it with water and then add it to my clothing. If I leave the two for a while then the dye sticks to the clothing. Making catalysts is the same only the clothing is aluminium oxide and the dye is platinum. Hope that makes sense!

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