Clean(er) car exhaust, the ability to make fertilizer from nitrogen in the air, and the promise of hydrogen fuel cells are among the practical applications of the surface, or solid state, chemistry methods elucidated by this year’s winner, Prof Gerhard Ertl, of Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin. Dr Ertl was director of the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Fritz-Haber for nearly 20 years before stepping down into a professor emeritus position in 2004.
Ertl was instrumental in several advances in understanding how chemical reactions take place on a solid surface, usually catalyzed by metals such as platinum or palladium. Surface chemistry happens all around us. That’s why it is difficult to keep metal surfaces clean and why stainless steel is a chemical miracle. Corrosion is the term for these normally unwanted chemical reactions and is as important in industry as it is in everyday life. Changing the metal composition of a surface material can dramatically affect its ability to undergo these reactions; think about this next time you look at the surface of the airplane you are boarding.
Among the earliest of these solid-phase reactions was the 1913 Haber-Bosch process whereby nitrogen from the air was converted to ammonia by the iron-catalyzed addition of hydrogen. Ammonia is the starting block for synthetic fertilizers. Haber won the Nobel in 1918 for this discovery but it wasn’t until Ertl’s work in the 1970s that allowed us to understand exactly how this happens (the bonds of hydrogen and nitrogen must both be broken for this reaction to proceed).
Ertl also elucidated the chemistry of the conversion of toxic carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide on a platinum surface, the chemistry that occurs everyday in your automobile’s catalytic converter. True to the elegance of European science, Ertl’s home institution hosts an animation of this platinum chemistry set to a commissioned classic music composition called, “On Platinum,” by Philip Mayers.
More information will accumulate throughout the day at the Nobel chemistry site.