Nanostellar: Breakthrough Catalyst Materials for the Automotive Market

Catalytic converters, used in motor vehicle exhaust systems, are key to reducing toxic emissions from the engine in:

• Cars
• Light- and heavy-duty trucks
• Diesel train engines
• Generators
• Any engine-equipped machine

As European, Japanese and U.S. legislation calls for increasingly stringent regulations that will severely limit the number of toxic chemicals and particulates released into the environment, and as Asia adopts a similar regulatory framework, Nanostellar is answering a growing market need to comply with these regulations as cost-effectively as possible.

Current automotive emissions-control catalysts often suffer from poor thermal stability (i.e., they "age" over time) and/or poisoning from components in the fuel or engine-out exhaust. Both of these issues result in catalyst deactivation as well as an increase in tailpipe emissions.

As a result, the automotive industry is continually demanding new catalysts that provide improved cost/performance ratios. Traditionally, the industry has used catalyst materials that are based on platinum, which is not only getting more and more expensive, but its supply is constrained. Through its Rational Catalyst Design methodology, Nanostellar has developed innovative new materials that not only replace platinum with cheaper palladium and gold nano-alloys, but offer:

• Improved thermal stability
• Greater resistance to poisoning
• Better light-off temperature

The result: Nanostellar materials are not only superior in performance to traditional platinum catalysts, but have lower PGM costs. This enables automotive manufacturers to meet emissions-control compliance regulations more cost-effectively than ever before. Nanostellar offers three products:

1. Nanostellar promoted Platinum material is appropriate for applications requiring low CO oxidation light-off temperatures and tunable NO oxidation characteristics. Some applications require low NO2 emissions to reduce smog forming chemicals in the air. Other applications, including catalyzed diesel particulate filters (CDPF), require thermal stability and low CO light off temperatures in order more efficiently burn trapped soot.
2. Nanostellar Pt:Pd 2:1material is appropriate for light duty diesel vehicles requiring excellent low temperature performance combined with excellent thermal stability, resistance to sulfur and phosphorus and 25%-30% better performance over traditional platinum only materials.
3. NS Gold™ (Pt:Pd:Au), our latest material, improves hydrocarbon oxidation by 20+% over Nanostellar Pt:Pd product and is suitable for heavy-duty trucks, new high efficiency diesel engines (e.g., HCCI) that operate at low temperatures, ammonia slip catalysts, VOC and natural gas engines.