A collaboration with KAUST researchers helps a multinational company rethink ways to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions using catalysts.

Umicore, one of the world’s largest materials technology companies, is actively searching for catalysts to remove nitrogen oxides (NOx) that operate at low temperatures. In 2019, their hunt led them to KAUST, where a newly hired professor with unique skills had recently arrived.

Although NOx gases garner less attention than other air pollutants, they are highly toxic for plant cells and harmful to human health, for example. This is having a dramatic impact on our environment: recent high-resolution satellite imagery indicates that these gases may reduce crop yields in some agricultural regions by up to 25 percent.

A primary source of NOx emissions comes from burning fuel in diesel engines. Catalytic converters installed in diesel engines can transform NOx into less harmful substances such as nitrogen gas and water. However, current devices are not effective at temperatures below 200 degrees Celsius — a flaw that causes pollutant levels to spike when a cold engine first starts.

“Our main goal is to understand catalysts while they are working, what we call operando,” says chemical engineer Javier Ruiz-Martίnez. “We do this by combining microscopy and spectroscopy with nano chips that we can put our catalysts inside. The tricky thing is duplicating the conditions that real catalysts experience — that’s not trivial.”

Read more at KAUST Discovery.