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Almost every chemical a country runs on — fertiliser, sulphuric acid, nitric acid, washing soda — is made by a named industrial process, and every one of those processes is really a story about a catalyst.
A catalyst is a substance that changes the speed of a reaction without being used up in it. At the end you can recover it, chemically unchanged. It works by offering the reaction an easier path — a lower activation energy — so that more of the colliding molecules have enough energy to actually react.
That single idea turns reactions which would take years into reactions that finish in seconds, and it is why four process names keep returning in general science papers: Haber, Contact, Ostwald and Solvay. Learn what each one makes and which catalyst it uses, and you have answered most of what is ever asked about industrial chemistry.
1. Which catalyst is used in the Haber process for manufacturing ammonia?
2. The Contact process is used for the industrial manufacture of:
3. In the Contact process, the oxidation of sulphur dioxide to sulphur trioxide is carried out in the presence of:
4. Ammonia is catalytically oxidised over hot platinum gauze to manufacture which acid?
5. The Solvay process is used to manufacture:
6. A catalyst increases the rate of a chemical reaction by:
7. In the Haber process, molybdenum is added along with iron. Molybdenum acts as a:
8. What is the effect of adding a catalyst to a reversible reaction that has not yet reached equilibrium?