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Topic: Will a catalyst ever stop increasing the rate of reaction?  (Read 745 times)

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Offline ferretman25

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Will a catalyst ever stop increasing the rate of reaction?
« on: November 12, 2019, 04:01:31 PM »
For some chemical reaction, say for example, the Haber process to produce Ammonia with the catalyst vanadium oxide, will the catalyst ever stop decreasing the duration of the chemical reaction, reaching a saturation point? Why does this happen on the molecular level, using collision theory?

My initial idea was that the catalyst only reduces the activation energy, and no matter the amount of catalyst present, a proportion of reactant particles will always be below this threshold. Still this doesn't explain how in some reactions, a catalyst can speed up the reaction duration to be almost instantaneous.

Offline AWK

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