So this is a sample of ruthenium sponge. So the
ruthenium metal has been precipitated to form very fine
particles. So here we will just open the box
I am rather ashamed that I made a big mistake about
the name of ruthenium. I thought it referred to
somewhere in middle Europe perhaps in Czechoslovakia whereas ruthenium actually comes from Ruthenia
which is the Latin translation for the country that
is now called Russia and, in fact, the element Ruthenium
was first discovered in Russia in the city of Kazan.
Why would that be a particular cause of shame for you?
Well, because my father was born in Russia and
therefore to get something connected to Russia wrong is
a bit embarrassing.
The ruthenium is a very, very reactive metal especially
when it is formed in this very fine sponge type material.
Ruthenium was actually discovered relatively early in
the middle of the 19th century. There is some discussion,
whether in fact the Swedish chemist Berzelius analysed
something that contained ruthenium and missed it or
not, but I am not quite sure about that. But the reason
why I am interested in this is because I did my
doctorate with a supervisor and if you look at his
supervisor and then that Ö then go back one supervisor
after another you eventually get to the Swedish chemist
Berzelius who was my great, great, great, great, great,
great, great supervisor and you will find that most of the
chemists now working in the world were related to just a
few pioneering chemists in the 18th century.
So the ruthenium is very finely divided and if I tip it you
can see in the bottom of the vial very fine powders but
again because of the particle size this is really dark,
very black, very nice sample of ruthenium very useful
for catalytic chemistry.
It is as a catalyst that ruthenium is particularly famous.
Ruthenium itself if you look at a lump of the metal is a
kind of silvery colour. This is a sample of ruthenium as a
catalyst. Now because it is an expensive metal the
ruthenium is just distributed as a very thin layer on
silica. Silica is like sand and you can see that this finely
divided ruthenium looks black. They are very finely
divided so it has a large surface area so the molecules
can come in and react it. And my students were using
this catalyst to react an organic compound, that is one
with carbon and hydrogen and to get it to react with
more hydrogen and so they lent me this catalyst so I
could show it to you. There are other ruthenium catalysts which dissolve in the solution that
you are trying to get the reaction to go. And there
is a very famous catalyst named after the American chemist
Bob Grubbs, who won the Nobel prize about 4 years
ago, and his catalyst does a reaction which most
people even some chemists had not heard of called which
is called metathesis in which double bonds between two
carbon atoms are broken and joined together in a
different way. And you can use this for all sorts of things
you can make plastics out of oils; you can make new sorts
of wax; you can make a really great sort of wax that has
oxygen atoms in it; and if you use this for candles
then the oxygen atoms make fragrance molecules dissolve
much better than in ordinary wax. So you can have
a Christmas candle which, when you light it,
smells of Christmas pudding or smells of alcohol or
vanilla or whatever spice you want. You canít do that
with an ordinary wax but this ruthenium catalyst opens
up all sorts of things so that is why he got the
Nobel Prize.
He got the Nobel Prize because he made nice smelling
candles?
No, he got the Nobel Prize because he invented the
catalyst that opened up all sorts of reactions that
otherwise could not be done. Bob Grubbs compound has
ruthenium and his is the most widely used and it is now
used in a whole series of industrial processes. This is
another compound of ruthenium which you can see is a
rather nice red colour and it has the rather unromantic
name of ruthenium Bpy three times or chemists who use
it call it RuBpy. And the point about this compound is
that it absorbs light well and it is very stable, you can
shine light on it, very intense light for a long time and
the compound does not decompose, it does not change.
But what it can do when you shine light is that you can
move electrons around inside the compound and this
compound and ones like it are being used by people to
try and capture the light from the sun - capture solar
energy