How a new strategy aims to break the catalytic speed limit

Conventionally, one way to speed up important and useful chemical reactions is to think about the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, according to Paul Dauenhauer from the University of Minnesota, US. But the chemical version doesn’t involve anyone tasting porridge. Known as the Sabatier principle, it instead considers how strongly molecules bind to the surface of a catalyst. ‘The fastest catalysts bind molecules to the surface neither too weakly nor too strongly,’ Dauenhauer explains.

In 2004, the first year that Chemistry World was published, the magazine profiled Paul Sabatier, winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He shared the prize with Victor Grignard, with both of them having developed better ways to do chemical reactions with carbon-based molecules, aided by metal catalysts. Sabatier also famously introduced his principle describing the ideal characteristics of a catalyst. He stated that if reactants adsorb too weakly, they may not benefit from the reaction-accelerating activation the catalyst is intended to provide. If, once the catalyst has helped convert the reactants to products, the binding is too tight the products may not come off the catalyst. That would prevent the catalysts going on to promote further reactions.