Biomaterial Database

Synthesis of core@shell catalysts guided by Tammann temperature. 2024

Pei Xiong, and Zhihang Xu, and Tai-Sing Wu, and Tong Yang, and Qiong Lei, and Jiangtong Li, and Guangchao Li, and Ming Yang, and Yun-Liang Soo, and Robert David Bennett, and Shu Ping Lau, and Shik Chi Edman Tsang, and Ye Zhu, and Molly Meng-Jung Li

Department of Applied Physics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.

Designing high-performance thermal catalysts with stable catalytic sites is an important challenge. Conventional wisdom holds that strong metal-support interactions can benefit the catalyst performance, but there is a knowledge gap in generalizing this effect across different metals. Here, we have successfully developed a generalizable strong metal-support interaction strategy guided by Tammann temperatures of materials, enabling functional oxide encapsulation of transition metal nanocatalysts. As an illustrative example, Co@BaAl2O4 core@shell is synthesized and tracked in real-time through in-situ microscopy and spectroscopy, revealing an unconventional strong metal-support interaction encapsulation mechanism. Notably, Co@BaAl2O4 exhibits exceptional activity relative to previously reported core@shell catalysts, displaying excellent long-term stability during high-temperature chemical reactions and overcoming the durability and reusability limitations of conventional supported catalysts. This pioneering design and widely applicable approach has been validated to guide the encapsulation of various transition metal nanoparticles for environmental tolerance functionalities, offering great potential to advance energy, catalysis, and environmental fields.