Recently, Prof. Jieshan Qiu and Prof. Qi Yang from College of Chemical Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology (BUCT) published a research paper entitled Surface atom knockout for the active site exposure of alloy catalyst in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Through using strategies of surface molecular chemical engineering, gene knockout in biotechnology, and battery electrochemical reactions, they developed a surface atom electrochemical knockout method for the fine regulation of the structure and properties of alloy nano-catalyst. This new method is thought to facilitate the interdisciplinary development of electrochemical engineering, material chemistry, and multi-phase catalysis.
The fine regulation of catalysts by the atomic-level removal of inactive atoms can promote the active site exposure for the catalysis performance enhancement, whereas suffering from the difficulty in controllably removing atoms using current micro/nano-scale material fabrication technologies.This work reports a surface atom knockout method for the controllable removal of the inactive atoms to achieve the exposure of the active sites in Cu3Pd alloy catalyst. It involves assembling a battery using Cu3Pd alloy and Zn as electrodes, which realizes the electricity-driven knockout of Cu atoms. The precise knockout of Cu atoms is confirmed by the linear relationship between the amount of the removed Cu atoms and the battery cumulative specific capacity. The as-processed alloy achieves an apparent catalysis performance enhancement for oxygen reduction reaction. This work presents a proof-of-concept atomic fabrication method, which promotes the development of material synthesis and regulation.
The first author is Yi Ma, a master student from BUCT. The corresponding authors are Prof. Jieshan Qiu and Prof. Qi Yang from BUCT, and Prof. Chunyi Zhi from City University of Hong Kong (CityU).
