Electrochemical promotion of catalysis (EPOC) perspectives for application to gas emissions treatment

Heterogeneous Catalysis and Electrocatalysis can be used very effectively on air pollution control. Air emissions coming either from mobile sources or from stationary sources, including volatile organic emissions, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide could be well converted to harmless non-pollutants at reasonable temperatures with cost-effective systems utilizing heterogeneous catalysis and suitable catalysts. Some of the disadvantages of conventional heterogeneous catalysts are the high production cost (since most of them are metal supported catalysts), the short life time (due to the catalyst deactivation) and the weakness to control their activity during the catalytic process. A new phenomenon of Solid State Electrochemistry called Electrochemical Promotion of Catalysis (EPOC) combined with classical heterogeneous catalysis could be applied in order to overcome some of the above problems. In this paper we are trying to show with characteristic examples how EPOC could be useful in environmentally important reactions (oxidations, reductions, etc). The results show that EPOC reveals great perspectives in environmental issues and especially in gas emissions treatment technology. The utilization of EPOC could be really useful since we can increase the catalytic activity, alter the selectivity to the desirable products and simultaneous control the reaction rate during a given electrocatalytic process.