Cascade anchoring strategy for general mass production of high-loading single-atomic metal-nitrogen catalysts

By Lu Zhao, Yun Zhang, Lin‐Bo Huang, Xiaozhi Liu, Qinghua Zhang, Chao He, Ze-Yuan Wu, Lin-juan Zhang, Jinpeng Wu, Wanli Yang and 3 more. Nature Communications, 2019

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Although single-atomically dispersed metal-Nx on carbon support (M-NC) has great potential in heterogeneous catalysis, the scalable synthesis of such single-atom catalysts (SACs) with high-loading metal-Nx is greatly challenging since the loading and single-atomic dispersion have to be balanced at high temperature for forming metal-Nx. Herein, we develop a general cascade anchoring strategy for the mass production of a series of M-NC SACs with a metal loading up to 12.1 wt%. Systematic investigation reveals that the chelation of metal ions, physical isolation of chelate complex upon high loading, and the binding with N-species at elevated temperature are essential to achieving high-loading M-NC SACs. As a demonstration, high-loading Fe-NC SAC shows superior electrocatalytic performance for O2 reduction and Ni-NC SAC exhibits high electrocatalytic activity for CO2 reduction. The strategy paves a universal way to produce stable M-NC SAC with high-density metal-Nx sites for diverse high-performance applications. Although single atom catalysts (SACs) with high-loading metal-Nx have great potential in heterogeneous catalysis, their scalable synthesis remains challenging. Here, the authors develop a general cascade anchoring strategy for the mass production of a series of metal-Nx SACs with a metal loading up to 12.1 wt%.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/727885ff2e2bb727c0626fd6adb9111bae78c2f8