Strem Chemicals, Inc, a manufacturer of specialty chemicals for research and development, announced that it has entered into a distribution agreement with Mintek for their gold catalysts developed through Project AuTEK.
“Gold catalysis has had a recent resurgence” said Dr. Ephraim S. Honig, COO at Strem Chemicals “so we are pleased to be extending our line of gold homogeneous catalysts with the Project AuTEK’s heterogeneous line”.
Project AuTEK AUROlite™ gold catalysts perform in a variety of applications, such as gas phase CO oxidation, and may be used in respiratory protection devices. “In terms of low temperature CO oxidation our catalysts outperform the current employed Hopcalite and PGM catalyst technologies, furthermore we see a bright future for their use in liquid phase oxidations and other industrial relevant reactions”, said Jason McPherson, Engineer at Project AuTEK. Other applications that have been demonstrated include the low temperature oxidation of methane, the selective oxidation of D-lactose to D-lactobionic acid and the aerobic oxidation of aldehydes to esters among others.
Strem will be offering 3 varieties of the AUROliteTM line of gold catalysts, with a 1% loading of gold on aluminum oxide, titanium dioxide and zinc oxide supports. Each catalyst offered will be “commercial grade” as AuTEK has already scaled up its production capacity. The gold itself is deposited on the support via a proprietary process that yields gold nano crystallites of about 2-3nm.