A New Catalyst Creates Healthy Changes

We all try to live healthier lives every day: maybe we try to eat a little better, or exercise a little more; or maybe we recycle a little more often. There’s one innovation from UCF that could revolutionize the food we eat and the air we breathe, through an everyday process called catalysis.

Catalysis involves a substance called a catalyst, which speeds up a chemical reaction and can be recovered chemically unchanged at the end of the reaction. Most catalysts are metal-based, like nickel, but they are also expensive. We have to procure them from countries as close by as Canada and as far away as Russia. Catalysts are often used in a process called hydrogenation. This process is used to create a food product many people use on a daily basis: margarine.

A container of margarine starts off as vegetable oil, which is combined with a metal-based catalyst, such as nickel or copper, then heated at high temperature (around 200°C) for six hours, while high-pressured hydrogen gas is pumped through it. Excited hydrogen atoms puncture the vegetable oil molecules and chemically change them. Once the mixture has cooled, it becomes hard, little beads—hydrogenated oil. These oil beads are mixed with liquid vegetable oil and heated at a high temperature. This cooled mixture results in margarine.

Unfortunately, one complication of the hydrogenation process is that the catalyst can leech into the final food product, and metal-based catalysts have been linked to factors of increased cardiovascular disease. The metal-free catalyst created at UCF contains boron nitride, and therefore eliminates the need for metal-based catalysts in hydrogenation. Boron is found in the United States—Boron, California—and makes using boron nitride a much cheaper, healthier alternative.

Not only can this metal-free catalyst help to make our food healthier, it can also help to make our air cleaner. Carbon dioxide, CO₂, is a part of the Earth’s carbon cycle—the symbiotic relationship that humans and animals have with plant life and the atmosphere. Its excess has caused climate change, ever since the Industrial Revolution of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. According to the EPA, in 2013, CO₂ accounted for about 82 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions—most of it coming from fossil fuel combustion used in the creation of electricity and transportation.

The EPA provides guidelines on how we handle CO₂ emission: making buildings, appliances, and vehicles more energy efficient; increasing energy conservation; methods in switching to fuels with lower carbon and developing renewable energy sources; and carbon capture and sequestration. This new catalyst can be used with CO₂ in the hydrogenation process, creating formic acid. Formic acid has a variety of uses: as a preservative and antibacterial agent in livestock feed, leather, rubber and textile production, as well as in cleaning products, insecticides, and, potentially, in fuel cells. The hydrogenation process involving CO₂ can also create biofuels, plastics, and pharmaceutical precursors. As with food processing, this method is inexpensive and can improve one’s health and transforms CO₂ from a waste product to a commodity.

Click here to read more about this technology, or contact Brion Berman in the Office of Technology Transfer.

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