钯、铂这类贵金属能在化学反应中起到催化剂的 作用,因此在汽车、化学和制药等领域有重要应用,但寻找这些稀有金属并不容易。来自Pittsburgh大学的化学家发现了一种快速简便且低成本的探测钯 /铂的方法。结果发表在9月21日的在线版《Journal of the American Chemical Society》上。
Chemists Develop Easier Way To Find Platinum, Other Rare Metals
Finding uses for palladium and platinum-rare precious metals coveted by the automobile, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries as catalysts in chemical reactions-proves easier than finding the scarce materials themselves.
Detection involves expensive instruments operated by highly trained chemists that take days to return results. But chemists at the University of Pittsburgh have unearthed a fast, easy, and inexpensive method that could help in the discovery of palladium/platinum deposits and streamline the production of pharmaceuticals. The research was published online Sept. 21 in the “Journal of the American Chemical Society.”
The new method was developed in the laboratory of Kazunori Koide (Ko-ee-deh), a chemistry professor in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences. It relies on a colorless fluorescein-based solution (similar to that used to find blood residue at crime scenes) that-under a simple hand-held ultraviolet lamp-glows green when it comes in contact with even minute amounts of palladium and platinum, which coexist in nature.
The process takes approximately one hour as opposed to the effective but complex and days-long analysis currently employed in the mining and pharmaceutical industries, Koide explained. Moreover, the Pitt team's method can accommodate hundreds of samples at once whereas current technology analyzes samples only one at a time, Koide said.
A major pharmaceutical company is currently evaluating Koide's method in detecting trace amounts of palladium in drug samples, Koide said. Although crucial in drug development, residual palladium in pharmaceuticals can be toxic, which means stringent chemical analysis is required to find this metal. Shortening the analysis to an hour will help get drugs to market faster and, in mining, find viable quantities of these essential metals.
Palladium and platinum are practically unmatched as catalysts and thus important to the chemical, pharmaceutical, and automobile industries (both are popular as jewelry, too). Palladium is most used in the catalytic converters that render car exhaust less toxic. But known palladium/platinum deposits dot only a few countries-including the United States and Canada-which makes the prices and supply unstable.