I’m not a chemist and chemistry was always difficult for me, but this seems like a big deal:

New form of aluminum could replace precious metals for a fraction of the cost

…from King’s College London, where a team of researchers working alongside chemists from Trinity College Dublin has managed to put together a brand new form of the metal that could replace these pricier options. The metal has been engineered into a new molecule, which they call cyclotrialumane. It is basically three aluminum atoms bonded together in a triangle, making it a trimer.

…

The molecule has shown early promise in the lab, suggesting it could eventually help drive important chemical reactions. The researchers were able to use it to split dihydrogen, the H2 molecules that make up hydrogen gas. Splitting the hydrogen molecule is the main driver of hydrogen energy production, and the same process that runs hydrogen-powered vehicles, so this could help with clean fuel production. The molecule also acted as a catalyst in the controlled chain growth of ethene, which happens to be one of the main building blocks of plastics.

Then there is the weird stuff. Bakewell and her team found that reacting the trimer with ethene creates ring structures that nobody has documented before. These include rings built out of five and seven atoms of aluminum and carbon mixed together. That hints at a whole new class of reactions that go past what platinum and palladium can manage on their own.

So… catalytic converters, fuel cells, and many devices used in thousands of other chemical processes may get much cheaper. Interesting.

And I thought transparent aluminum was a big deal. This could be much bigger.