From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu

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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
Scientists reveal breakthrough that could lead to cleaner hydrogen energy
LAWRENCE — Chemists at the University of Kansas and U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have taken a big step toward splitting hydrogen and oxygen molecules to make pure hydrogen — without using fossil fuels.
Results from pulse radiolysis experiments have laid bare the complete reaction mechanism for an important group of “water-splitting” catalysts. The KU and Brookhaven work means scientists are closer to making pure hydrogen from renewable energy, an energy source that could contribute to a greener future for the nation and world.
Their findings appear this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Understanding how the chemical reactions that make clean fuels like hydrogen work is very challenging — this paper represents the culmination of a project that I started in my very first year at KU,” said co-author James Blakemore, associate professor of chemistry, whose research in Lawrence forms the basis of the discovery.
“Our paper presents data that were hard-won from specialized techniques to understand how a certain catalyst for hydrogen generation does the job,” he said. “The techniques that were used both here at KU and Brookhaven are quite specialized. Implementing these allowed us to get a full picture of how to make hydrogen from its constituent parts, protons and electrons.”
Blakemore’s research at KU was the foundation of the breakthrough. He took his work to Brookhaven for research using pulse radiolysis, as well as other techniques, at their Accelerator Center for Energy Research. Brookhaven is one of only two places in the nation housing equipment that enables pulse radiolysis experiments.
“It’s very rare that you can get a complete understanding of a full catalytic cycle,” said Brookhaven chemist Dmitry Polyansky, a co-author of the paper. “These reactions go through many steps, some of which are very fast and cannot be easily observed.”
Blakemore and his collaborators made the discovery by studying a catalyst that is based on a pentamethylcyclopentadienyl rhodium complex, which is [Cp*Rh] for short. They focused on the Cp* (pronounced C-P-“star”) ligand paired with the rare metal rhodium because of hints from prior work showing that this combination would be suitable for the work.
“Our rhodium system turned out to be a good target for the pulse radiolysis,” Blakemore said. “The Cp* ligands, as they’re called, are familiar to most organometallic chemists, and really chemists of all stripes. They’re used to support many catalysts and can stabilize a variety of species involved in catalytic cycles. One key finding of this paper gives fresh insight into how the Cp* ligand can be intimately involved in the chemistry of hydrogen evolution.”
But Blakemore stressed the findings could lead to other improved chemical processes besides producing clean hydrogen.
“In our work, we hope that chemists will see a study about how a common ligand, Cp*, can enable unusual reactivity,” the KU researcher said. “This unusual reactivity is relevant to the hydrogen story, but it’s actually bigger than this because Cp* is found in so many different catalysts. Chemists normally think of catalysts as being based on metals. In this way of thinking, if you’re making a new molecule, the metal is the key actor that brings the constituent parts together. Our paper shows that this isn’t always the case. Cp* can be involved in stitching the pieces together to form products.”
Blakemore said he hoped this paper could be an opening that leads to improvements in other catalysts and systems that rely on Cp* ligands. The breakthrough, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and the DOE Office of Science, could apply more broadly to industrial chemistry. Blakemore is now working on applying techniques like those used in this work to the development of new approaches to recycling of nuclear fuels and handling of actinide species.
KU students at the graduate and undergraduate levels also were involved in research that underpinned the breakthrough.
“This project was a very important training vehicle for students,” Blakemore said. “Graduate student Wade Henke, the first author, is now at Argonne National Laboratory as a postdoc. Graduate student Yun Peng is the second author and kicked off the joint work with Brookhaven; both have now finished their Ph.D.s. Undergraduates also contributed to this project over the years, providing new complexes and insights that we used to frame the story that emerged in this paper.
“All in all, I consider this a successful project and one that was a real team effort over the years.”

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Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs

From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu

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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
KU professor writes modern textbook for modern art

LAWRENCE — Like the sometimes shocking subjects of his new textbook, Modern Art: A Global Survey From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (Oxford University Press), author David Cateforis felt the responsibility to live up to modernist poet Ezra Pound’s dictum to “make it new!”

The chair of the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas, Cateforis worked for six years to write a new textbook that serves as an introduction to modern art but with an expanded, global purview that includes artists from Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East who attained prominence before the late 20th century. It also comes in digital form with web links to more images than are included in the printed book.

“This book is not quite encyclopedic, but it is certainly broad and extensive,” Cateforis said. “Mine is the first modern art textbook to give attention to countries outside of Europe and North America that have not been part of the narrative before. I think that is an important contribution, representative of the global turn in the discipline of art history.”

For Cateforis, “Modernity is all about constant change, constant revolution … technological and scientific developments.

“In art, modernism often goes hand in hand with the idea of avant-gardism, the idea of pushing forward and exploring or discovering new expressive territory,” he said. “To define what modern art is all about, I think the key word is innovation.”

Certain artists and artworks, Cateforis said, transcend novelty to achieve originality and influence. Those are the ones he has featured in his new book.

“Modern art is shocking in different ways at different times,” Cateforis said.

Several such causes célèbres are recounted in the book.

“As an educator, I’m interested in those instances of controversy for what they tell us about conventional tastes versus an artist’s attempt to break out of convention and do something that makes us see and think in different ways,” he said.

The forces of modernity — driven by capitalism and colonialism — moved at a different pace in different parts of the globe, Cateforis wrote.

In Chapter 11, “Modern Art in Asia: India, Japan, Korea and China, c. 1900-1945,” he wrote, “Whereas in the West the history of modernism is primarily understood as the history of the avant-garde with its emphasis on constant innovation, the modernisms of early twentieth-century Asia are better conceived as involving mutations within national cultural traditions … In many cases, eclecticism rather than aggressive originality counted as a modernist strategy for Asian artists.”

Not only are there chapters on the modern arts of India, East Asia, Africa and the Middle East, but the work of previously overlooked artists not from Europe or United States is also woven into other chapters. For instance, in the chapter on mid-century modern architecture, in addition to Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, Cateforis includes such figures as Brazil’s Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi and Japan’s Kenzō Tange. Besides its expanded geographic scope, the book also highlights the work of women, many never before featured in modern art textbooks, such as Spain’s María Blanchard and South Africa’s Irma Stern.

Of course, all the familiar names in modern art are covered, such as Van Gogh, Picasso, Dalí, O’Keeffe and Warhol. It also includes late 20th century postmodernism and art of the current century.

“I was concerned with making it informative, accessible and accurate,” Cateforis said.

The KU researcher said he synthesized information from many books and learned a lot himself while writing the extensively footnoted textbook.

“I’m providing interpretations, but I’m not claiming they’re the only possible interpretations,” he said. “I want it to be useful to teachers and to the general reader. I want it to be an introduction, a kind of opening. The section on Ko Hŭi-dong, who is known as Korea’s first oil painter, introduces him to an English-reading audience that may have little or no knowledge of Korean art history.”

The book likewise includes M.F. Husain, popularly known as India’s Picasso.

“This is the work of the textbook — to introduce into this survey of modern art these important figures from countries outside of Europe and North America that had been neglected or ignored,” he said.

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KU News Service
1450 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence KS 66045
Phone: 785-864-3256
Fax: 785-864-3339
[email protected]
http://www.news.ku.edu

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs