Many people have never heard the word zeolite, let alone know
what one
is. But if you have ever ridden in a car, flown on a plane, or used
anything that is dependent on the modern petrochemical industry,
zeolites have impacted your life. While used in many industrial processes, they are most widely used as
solid-acid catalysts. One of their most important industrial
roles is catalytic cracking, where the crude oil
that we pump from the ground is transformed into the gasoline that we all so desperately depend on
each day. (Editorial note: not if you live some place with decent public transit.)
A textbook might define zeolites as follows: zeolites are microporous, crystalline
aluminosilicates constructed from tetrahedral base units. Informative, no? Zeolites
are made of little pyramids of silica (SiO2)
and
often alumina (AlO2) arranged in crystal with a complex, but ordered, network of pores running
throughout it. What makes them so important is that these
pores have diameters of a few angstroms (10-10m),
the size of small
molecules.
Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica – News
