Eli5: What does a catalyst do to reduce activation energy ?

Question

Whenever I search about this, it always just say they reduce activation energy and provide alternate reaction path but what is it actually doing to achieve this ?

In: 3

Answer 1

The catalyst provides an alternate pathway of reaction. So instead of A + B -> AB which might have a high activation energy you might have A + C -> AC and then AC + B -> AB + C which might have much lower activation energies. And even though the catalyst (C) is technically part of the reaction and is bonded in the intermediary steps the end result have the same catalyst as output as were given as input. So there is no net loss in catalytic material.