single-atom catalysts, X-ray absorption spectroscopy
NSRRC Users and Scientists’ Collaborative Research on Building the Largest Reported Library of Single-Atom Catalysts Published in Nature Materials
2022/07/18
NSRRC Users Prof. Huolin L. Xin (University of California, Irvine, USA) and Prof. Way-Faung Pong (Tamkang University), NSRRC Scientists Dr. Chih-Wen Pao and Dr. Chia-Hsin Wang coordinated an international research team and work on the research of single-atom catalysts. Their brilliant research results were published in Nature Materials.
Atomically dispersed single-atom catalysts exhibit notable catalytic activity and selectivity and thus have the potential to bridge heterogeneous and homogeneous catalysis. Although promising, there is limited knowledge about the boundaries for the monometallic single-atom phase space, not to mention multimetallic phase spaces. In the research, the team presented single-atom catalysts based on 37 monometallic elements synthesized using a dissolution-and-carbonization method. X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) and extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) at TPS 44A, as well as the in-situ soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy at TLS 24A1 were used for characterization and structure analysis. They uncovered unified principles on the oxidation state, coordination number, bond length, coordination element and metal loading. Most of all, they built the largest reported library of single-atom catalysts, spanning from monometallic to concentration-complex multimetallic materials for the rational design of single-atom catalysts.
