Catalytic properties of trivalent rare-earth oxides with intrinsic surface oxygen vacancy.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38982071.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-49981-9 and PMC identifier 11233603.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Oxygen vacancy (O<sub>v</sub>) is an anionic defect widely existed in metal oxide lattice, as exemplified by CeO<sub>2</sub>, TiO<sub>2</sub>, and ZnO. As O<sub>v</sub> can modify the band structure of solid, it improves the physicochemical properties such as the semiconducting performance and catalytic behaviours. We report here a new type of O<sub>v</sub> as an intrinsic part of a perfect crystalline surface. Such non-defect O<sub>v</sub> stems from the irregular hexagonal sawtooth-shaped structure in the (111) plane of trivalent rare earth oxides (RE<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>). The materials with such intrinsic O<sub>v</sub> structure exhibit excellent performance in ammonia decomposition reaction with surface Ru active sites. Extremely high H<sub>2</sub> formation rate has been achieved at ~1 wt% of Ru loading over Sm<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>, Y<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> and Gd<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> surface, which is 1.5-20 times higher than reported values in the literature. The discovery of intrinsic O<sub>v</sub> suggests great potentials of applying RE oxides in heterogeneous catalysis and surface chemistry.