"Hydrogenation" is a term seen on many edible foods these days. It implies spillover catalysis. It also implies that the maker of the product is too cheap to use butter.
The process is commonly employed to reduce vegetable oils. Hydrogenation typically constitutes the addition of atomic hydrogen to another molecule. Catalysts are required for the reaction to be usable and they do not have a long lifetime. In the Great Depression - butter was an expensive commodity, and margarine had already been invented 100 years earlier as a cheaper substitute not needing cows - but using soybean oil instead - yet it wasn't really all that cheap till Raney came along. "Raney nickel" was developed near Chattanooga TN - by the predecessor company of WR Grace in 1926 by Murray Raney as a "hydrogenation catalyst" for converting vegetable oils to margarine and other marvelously cheap edibles. It is an effective hydrogenation catalyst, but primarily only used today as an nickel alloy - not pure nickel. The alloy, even after aluminum removal - is typically 85-90% nickel. The original aluminum that it is cast from never alloys with nickel - and can be leached out leaving an extremely reactive nano-equivalent surface. The sodium hydroxide leachant, when some is left-over, also improves the spillover capability of Raney nickel This is the recent history of the Rossi effect- in my opinion. He has discovered an alloy of nickel which is far preferable to those current available from Grace, or from other suppliers (mostly from China) as an alternative to the brand name of Raney Nickel, which is still a trademarked name. An inventor can say, in complete honesty, but with a complete intent to deceive: "I do not use Raney nickel" ... which only means that he did not buy the catalyst from WR Grace & Co and who would? It costs about 4 times more from Grace than from anyone else. Jones
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