I’ve asked this question to multiple teachers and googled it multiple times only to hear “yeah if you put a catalyst in a chemical it reacts faster” but I want to know what the catalyst actually does to do this
In: Chemistry
In chemistry if you drew a graph of all the energy in a chemical reaction you would see a flat line, parabola that goes up and then down, and then a slope down to another flat line at a lower energy.
In order to raise the energy in the system often some sort of heat or energy needs to be added into the chemical system, this added energy is called the activation energy.
What a catalyst does lower this activation energy.
Think of when you open a bottle of soda at first you open the bottle and bubbles form, you had to put in some energy to get the cap off and you have a reaction, well if you then take a mentos mint and put it in there, suddenly the energy needed for the reaction is reduced and lots of bubbles form. In this case the mentos doesn’t react chemically it reacts physically it is not used up in the reaction and so in this case the mentos is a catalyst. Its not a perfect example since the activation energy in this case is twisting the cap off and that will stay the same regardless but I think it shows what a catalyst does.
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