AS many as 300 chemical engineers and scientists from around the world have arrived in Newcastle for the ninth International Conference on Environmental Catalysis.
Conference organiser Michael Stockenhuber from the University of Newcastle’s School of Engineering said catalysis was the science of accelerating chemical reactions using an introduced substance or “catalyst”.
Associate Professor Stockenhuber said one practical example was the catalytic converter on a car exhaust, which used a precious metal such as palladium to chemically strip pollutants out of exhaust gases.
Dr Stockenhuber said catalysis operated at the molecular level and chemical engineers in this field had been dealing with nano-particles since before the term came into popular use.
He said two of three headlining plenary speakers were dealing directly with “nano” reactions. Professor Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulos from Tufts University in the United States says “the era of designing . . . single atom catalysts is upon us”, while Wednesday’s plenary speaker, Professor Xinhe Bao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, would talk about “novel” nano-materials.
Dr Stockenhuber said using catalysis to tackle environmental problems was a growing field. He and his colleagues had applied for study grants to see how environmental catalysis could be used in dealing with the PFOS/PFOA contamination at Williamtown and other RAAF bases.
Dr Stockenhuber said the conference ran for three days at Newcastle City Hall from Monday. He said 30 per cent of the delegates were from China.
Australian participants made up 19 per cent of the conference numbers, followed by Japan with 11 per cent, France with 5 per cent, then Sweden, the US, South Korea, Germany and the UK.
Dr Stockenhuber said most of the subject matter was highly technical but the five broad themes of the conference showed how laboratory breakthroughs being made in catalysis were then being put to practical use.
Those themes were “sustainable and clean energy production”, “emission control”, “indoor air cleaning”, “water treatment” and “green engineering and chemistry”.
Dr Stockenhuber said it was an honour to have the conference in Newcastle. The presence of so many international academics showed the importance of a university oriented towards international collaboration.
“The public may not know a lot about catalysis but it’s intensely important to industry and to reducing our carbon footprint,” Dr Stockenhuber said.
“Johannes Lercher from the Technical University of Munich, notes this in his paper, called: ‘Towards a zero-carbon footprint future – Linking fundamental science with practice’.”