In Germany, researchers added palladium to gallium and what happened was beautiful chemistry. The liquid catalyst is different from other catalysts because the reactants don’t dissolve in the metal and can handle higher temperatures making it quite useful and effective for industrial applications. The new catalyst also retained almost all its activity over 100 hours of operation time, which is quite a bit longer than the 20 hours for a platinum catalyst.
Peter Wasserscheid from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, told Chemistry World, “This new type of catalyst has great potential in industry, although if you come along with something completely different from what people are used to, you generate a lot of questions such as whether it can be handled, whether it can be produced on a large enough scale and, if it does lose its activity, whether it can be regenerated the same way we regenerate today’s catalysts.”