Abstract Detail

Abstract

Precious metal elements are essential in many existing and emerging solid (heterogeneous) catalysts and constitute the most important class of catalytically active components. High surface area supporting materials (porous oxides or mixed oxides including zeolites and zeolitic materials) are essentially required in this class of catalysts to disperse and stabilize the precious metal entities at sizes down to the subnanometer for improving the utilization efficiency and mass activity of the precious metal elements to catalytically accelerate the desirable reactions. These precious-metal-involving catalysts are widely used in energy conversion, chemical and petrochemical industries, pollutant removal from air and water, recycling of polymer wastes and other environmental protection technologies, as well as in fine, special and pharmaceutical chemicals syntheses. This presentation intends to highlight the approaches practiced in the author’s laboratory in the design and preparation of precious-metal-efficient thermal and electro catalysts. Main discussion will be made on catalysts involving: 1) Precious metal element dispersed as isolated cations at the surface of supporting materials; 2) Pt-on-Au, Pt-on-Ag or Pt-on-Co nanostructures; 3) Multimetallic core@shell nanostructures with Pt enriched to the outmost layers; 4) Fe and N codoped carbon (Fe-N-C) as an alternative of anode Pt catalyst. Representative samples and electronic structures for their active sites will be presented to show the improvement in the atom efficiency of Pt in the nanostructured catalysts, especially for the electrochemical oxygen reduction reaction (ORR).

Biography

Bo-Qing Xu is a Professor of Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University (Beijing, China). He completed his doctorate in heterogeneous catalysis at Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP, Chinese Academy of Sciences) in 1988. After working as a research associate at DICP for three years, he joined the faculty of the School of Chemical Engineering at Dalian University of Technology (DUT) and became a full Professor in 1992. He also worked as a visiting scientist at Northwestern University and Georgia Institute of Technology in late middle of 1990s, and a short-term visiting professor at UC Berkeley of USA in2002. His research interest mainly focuses on heterogeneous catalysis for sustainable chemistry in energy conversion. He has authored 260+ peer-reviewed publications and owns 23 patents.