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Nano-sized Ag rather than single-atom Ag determines CO oxidation activity and stability

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Abstract

Single-atom catalysis recently attracts great attentions, however, whether single atom or their nanoparticle (NP) has the advantage in its intrinsic activity remains under heated debate. Ag/Al2O3 is a widely used catalyst for many catalytic reactions, while the effect of Ag particle size on the activity is seldom investigated due to the great difficulty in synthesizing single atom Ag and Ag clusters/particles with different sizes. Herein, we firstly prepared an atomically dispersed Ag/Al2O3 catalyst using a nano-sized γ-Al2O3 as the support, subsequently obtained a series of Ag0/Al2O3 catalysts with different Ag particle sizes by H2 reducing single-atom Ag/Al2O3 catalyst at various temperatures. The Ag0/Al2O3 treated at 600 °C demonstrated superior CO oxidation performance over single-atom Ag/Al2O3 and the Ag/Al2O3 treated at 400 and 800 °C. Based on experimental data and density functional theory (DFT) calculation results, we reveal that the larger Ag0 particle is beneficial to oxygen activation and improves the valence stability during oxidation reaction, while the aggregation of Ag0 particle also accordingly decreases the concentration of surface active sites, hence, there is an optimum Ag0 particle size. Our findings clearly confirm that Ag0 nanoparticle has the advantage over single-atom Ag species in its intrinsic activity for CO oxidation.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52000093), the Chinese Post-doctoral Science Foundation (Nos. 2020T130271 and 2019M663911XB) and National Engineering Laboratory for Mobile Source Emission Control Technology (No. NELMS2019B03).

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Author notes

  1. Hong He

    Present address: Present address: State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, China

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, China

    Fei Wang, Honghong Wang, Min Chen, Changbin Zhang & Hong He

  2. Faculty of Environmental Science and Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, 650500, China

    Fei Wang, Zhao Li & Ping Ning

  3. Center for Excellence in Regional Atmospheric Environment, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen, 361021, China

    Hong He

  4. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Changbin Zhang & Hong He

Authors
  1. Fei Wang
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  2. Zhao Li
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  3. Honghong Wang
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  4. Min Chen
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Correspondence to Changbin Zhang or Hong He.

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Wang, F., Li, Z., Wang, H. et al. Nano-sized Ag rather than single-atom Ag determines CO oxidation activity and stability. Nano Res. 15, 452–456 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-021-3501-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-021-3501-1

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