Abstract
The stabilization of transition metals as isolated centres with high areal density on suitably tailored carriers is crucial for maximizing the industrial potential of single-atom heterogeneous catalysts. However, achieving single-atom dispersions at metal contents above 2 wt% remains challenging. Here we introduce a versatile approach combining impregnation and two-step annealing to synthesize ultra-high-density single-atom catalysts with metal contents up to 23 wt% for 15 metals on chemically distinct carriers. Translation to a standardized, automated protocol demonstrates the robustness of our method and provides a path to explore virtually unlimited libraries of mono- or multimetallic catalysts. At the molecular level, characterization of the synthesis mechanism through experiments and simulations shows that controlling the bonding of metal precursors with the carrier via stepwise ligand removal prevents their thermally induced aggregation into nanoparticles. The drastically enhanced reactivity with increasing metal content exemplifies the need to optimize the surface metal density for a given application. Moreover, the loading-dependent site-specific activity observed in three distinct catalytic systems reflects the well-known complexity in heterogeneous catalyst design, which now can be tackled with a library of single-atom catalysts with widely tunable metal loadings.
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Data availability
All data that support the findings of this study have been included in the main text and Supplementary Information. Any additional materials and data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Change history
04 March 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-022-01090-8
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Acknowledgements
J. Lu acknowledges support from MOE grant (R-143-000-B47-114), the Ministry of Education (Singapore) through the Research Centre of Excellence program (Award EDUN C-33-18-279-V12, Institute for Functional Intelligent Materials) and the National University of Singapore Flagship Green Energy Program (R-143-000-A55-646). X.Z. acknowledges support from a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore via grant 03INS000973C150. S.M., D.F.A., and J.P.-R. acknowledge funding from the NCCR Catalysis, a National Centre of Competence in Research funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Jun Li acknowledges financial support by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 22033005) and the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Catalysis (2020B121201002). Computational resources were supported by the Center for Computational Science and Engineering (SUSTech) and Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology. We would like to acknowledge the Facility for Analysis, Characterization, Testing and Simulation, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, for use of their electron microscopy facilities.
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X.H. and J. Lu conceived and designed the experiments. J.P.-R. conceived the automated synthesis protocol. J. Lu and J.P.-R. supervised the project and organized the collaboration. X.H. performed materials synthesis. S.M. and D.F.A performed automated synthesis. X.H. and T.S. performed the activity test. S.X. performed the XAFS measurement. X.Z., H.X. and D.K. performed the electron microscopy experiments and data analysis. C.S. helped to perform the CO-DRIFTS measurements. Jing Li performed the XPS measurements. Z.L. performed the nitrogen sorption measurements. H.Y. and Y.C. performed the X-ray diffraction measurements. K.H. and Jun Li carried out theoretical calculations. X.H., S.M., J.P.-R., Jun Li and J. Lu co-wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed and commented on the manuscript.
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Hai, X., Xi, S., Mitchell, S. et al. Scalable two-step annealing method for preparing ultra-high-density single-atom catalyst libraries. Nat. Nanotechnol. 17, 174–181 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-021-01022-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-021-01022-y
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