Golden solution to greenhouse emitions

Hybrid copper-gold nanoparticle convert carbon dioxide, may reduce greenhouse emissions
By Itza Montforte Noguez, Web writer

Copper was already known to reduce carblon dioxide since it can be converted into an electrode and stimulated with voltage so that the carbon dioxide is reduce to methane or methanol. This process requires relatibly low energy and produces fuel that might be used by the industries that produce carbon dioxide in first place.
This would be the perfet solution exept that copper is unstable thus easily oxidating metal slowing the reation with carbon dioxide and producing unwanted byproducts such as carbon monoxide and formic acid.

To ease this problem, researchers at MIT have come up with a solution that also reduces the energy needed for copper to reduce carbon dioxide. They mixed the stable properties of gold with copper forming hybrid nanoparticles of gold and copper that can resist corrosion and oxidation and use less energy to react with carbon dioxide.

Researchers have combined gold nanoparticles (in light red) with copper nanoparticles (in light green) to form hybrid nanoparticles (dark red), which they turned into powder (foreground) to catalyze carbon dioxide reduction.

The team chose to engineer partivle at the nanoscale in order to increase the surface area available for the interaction with carbon dioxide molecules.

To read more about this article by the MIT and know how this particles are made please visit:
http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=24876.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nanowerk%2FagWB+%28Nanowerk+Nanotechnology+News%29