Mingshang Jin and his research group develop a new approach for preparing high efficient metal nanocatalysts

  A new approach by Mingshang Jin’s research group at Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an based on combining nanoparticles coalescence and templating method is offering new thinking to the construction of high efficient metal catalysts. This research work has been published in Nano Letters (IF: 13.779). The title of this work is “Creation of Controllable High-Density Defects in Silver Nanowires for Enhanced Catalytic Property”.Structural defects have been proven to determine many of the materials’ properties. In this work, a unique approach to the creation of Ag nanowires with high-density defects through controllable nanoparticles coalescence in one-dimensional pores of mesoporous silica has been reported. The density of defects can be easily adjusted by tuning the annealing temperature during synthetic process. The high-density defects promote the adsorption and activation of more reactants on the surface of Ag nanowires during catalytic reactions. As a result, the as-prepared Ag nanowires exhibit enhanced activities in catalyzing dehydrogenative coupling reaction of silane in terms of apparent activation energy and turnover frequency (TOF). We show further that the silane conversion rate can be enhanced by maximizing the defect density and thus the number of active sites on the Ag nanowires, reaching a remarkable TOF of 8288 h-1, which represents the highest TOF that has been achieved by far on Ag catalysts. This work not only proves the important role of structural defects in catalysis but also provides a new and general strategy for constructing high-density defects in metal catalysts.

Link: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b02317

Jin was born in Zhejiang, China, in 1984. He received his BS degree in Chemistry (2006) and PhD degree in Physical Chemistry (2012) from Xiamen University (with Prof. Zhaoxiong Xie). He spent two years in Prof. Younan Xia’s group as a visiting graduate student from 2009-2011. At the beginning of 2012, he joined Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. His research interests include the rational design and synthesis of metal nanomaterials for applications in fuel cells, catalytic converters, organic catalysis. By far, he has published over 46 papers in high-impact SCI journals, with an h-index of 22.