Highly efficient decomposition of ammonia using high-entropy alloy catalysts

By Pengfei Xie, Yonggang Yao, Zhennan Huang, Zhenyu Liu, Junlei Zhang, Tangyuan Li, Guofeng Wang, R. Shahbazian‐Yassar, Liangbing Hu, Chao Wang. Nature Communications, 2019

683 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ammonia represents a promising liquid fuel for hydrogen storage, but its large-scale application is limited by the need for precious metal ruthenium (Ru) as catalyst. Here we report on highly efficient ammonia decomposition using novel high-entropy alloy (HEA) catalysts made of earth abundant elements. Quinary CoMoFeNiCu nanoparticles are synthesized in a single solid-solution phase with robust control over the Co/Mo atomic ratio, including those ratios considered to be immiscible according to the Co-Mo bimetallic phase diagram. These HEA nanoparticles demonstrate substantially enhanced catalytic activity and stability for ammonia decomposition, with improvement factors achieving >20 versus Ru catalysts. Catalytic activity of HEA nanoparticles is robustly tunable by varying the Co/Mo ratio, allowing for the optimization of surface property to maximize the reactivity under different reaction conditions. Our work highlights the great potential of HEAs for catalyzing chemical transformation and energy conversion reactions. Alloys are important materials for catalysis but are usually limited by miscibility gaps present in their phase diagrams. Here the authors break this limitation by developing high-entropy alloy catalysts made of five earth-abundant elements and demonstrate great catalytic enhancements for ammonia decomposition.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/90153494da9a4a9b96293ad9563e8a7020294914

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Catalysis

1. Jeff Greeley

In Materials Chemistry

1. Liangbing Hu
2. Jian Luo
3. Jianwei Miao
4. Jeff Greeley
5. Guofeng Wang
6. Ioannis G. Kevrekidis
7. Steven L. Brunton
8. Igor Mezi'c

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. Guofeng Wang
2. Liangbing Hu
3. Jeff Greeley
4. M. Chi
5. Zhiyong Jason Ren

Citations in the corpus

• High-entropy nanoparticles: Synthesis-structure-property relationships and data-driven discovery (2022, methodology): “for the first time demonstrated that high-entropy alloy nanoparticles can serve as highly efficient catalysts in thermocatalysis (8, 36).”