Designing a Nanoscale Three-phase Electrochemical Pathway to Promote Pt-catalyzed Formaldehyde Oxidation
- 9 December 2020
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Chemical Society (ACS) in Nano Letters
- Vol. 20 (12), 8719-8724
- https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.0c03560
Abstract
Gas-phase heterogeneous catalysis is a process spatially constrained on the two-dimensional surface of a solid catalyst. Here, we introduce a new toolkit to open up the third dimension. We discovered that the activity of a solid catalyst can be dramatically promoted by covering its surface with a nanoscale-thin layer of liquid electrolyte while maintaining efficient delivery of gas reactants, a strategy we call three-phase catalysis. Introducing the liquid electrolyte converts the original surface catalytic reaction into an electrochemical pathway with mass transfer facilitated by free ions in a three-dimensional space. We chose the oxidation of formaldehyde as a model reaction and observed a 25000-times enhancement in the turnover frequency of Pt in three-phase catalysis as compared to conventional heterogeneous catalysis. We envision three-phase catalysis as a new dimension for catalyst design and anticipate its applications in more chemical reactions from pollution control to the petrochemical industry.This publication has 32 references indexed in Scilit:
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