Did Your Catalytic Converter Get Stolen? The Pandemic--and Rhodium--Could Share Some Blame

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 06:00:00 GMT
Scientific American - Technology

In 2021 the search phrase “what precious metal is in a catalytic converter” saw a more than 5,000...

It's also the reason why thieves across the U.S. are sawing off catalytic converters in order to get their hands on a few precious grams of the world's most valuable metal.

The converter on regular fuel vehicles is simple: a stainless steel shell surrounds a ceramic honeycomb monolith- that monolith is coated with three important precious metals: platinum, palladium, and rhodium.

Because these metals, and especially rhodium are so stable and durable they can perform this function over an extremely long lifetime of the car part-suffering very little loss in performance.

So precious metals include the platinum group metals which are ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, platinum, osmium and iridium but also precious metals include other metals that are more familiar to the public like gold and silver.

Just to give you an example, rhodium which is one of the metals used in catalytic converters, the earth abundance of that is on the order of 1 part per billion.

It's a perfect storm creating a huge spike in prices for all of these precious metals and especially rhodium.

If car manufacturers can't buy these metals from mines-they'll get it somewhere else: recycling.

Recycled platinum group metals account for a large portion of the precious group metals used by American car manufacturers, which means it's big business.

Bullock: We're doing a lot of fundamental scientific studies on how to design new catalysts based on earth abundant metals like iron or nickel for reactions that are currently catalyzed by precious metals.

Rhodium will stay in our cars and be a potential target for thieves, looking to profit from the world's most valuable metal.

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