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Unlocking the Potential of Nanoparticles Composed of Immiscible Elements for Direct H2O2 Synthesis
journal contribution
posted on 2019-08-23, 13:42 authored by Donghun Kim, Hyobin Nam, Young-Hoon Cho, Byung Chul Yeo, So-Hye Cho, Jae-Pyung Ahn, Kwan-Young Lee, Seung Yong Lee, Sang Soo HanToday,
multimetallic nanoparticles (NPs) are extensively studied
to search for high-performance catalysts. Unfortunately, a huge material
space of NPs composed of immiscible elements has been generally disregarded
for catalyst development due to the inherent difficulty of alloy synthesis.
Herein, for the direct synthesis of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), we demonstrate that NPs of immiscible elemental combinations
of Rh–Ag, Rh–Au, Pt–Au, and Ir–Ag can
efficiently produce H2O2, despite the negligible
activities of Rh, Pt, Ir, Ag, and Au alone. In particular, we show
that two catalysts, Rh13Ag87 and Pt28Au72 NPs, can outperform prototypic Pd NPs. Rh13Ag87 NPs, owing to their high content of the less-expensive
element Ag, exhibit a 7.3-fold enhancement in cost-normalized productivity
compared to Pd and, thus, may serve as an economical option. The other
catalyst of Pt28Au72 NPs exhibits a productivity
of 300 mmol gcat–1 h–1 and a 15-fold increase over that of Pd under isoconversion conditions.
The observed remarkable productivities of these NPs are a result of
the synergy between the two elemental domains at the interface. The
present study suggests that the hitherto underutilized space of immiscible
elemental combinations should be more actively searched for the development
of improved catalyst materials.