Propylene is one of the most produced chemical products in the world and serves as a crucial raw material in the fields of plastics, rubber, and pharmaceuticals, holding significant importance in the global petrochemical industry chain. Traditionally, the production processes either use expensive metals or metal oxides with limited catalytic performance. Recently, we successfully developed an u...

The industrial catalysts utilized for propane dehydrogenation (PDH) to propylene, an important alternative to petroleum-based cracking processes, either use expensive metals or metal oxides that are environmentally unbenign. We report that a typically less-active oxide, titanium oxide (TiO2), can be combined with earth-abundant metallic nickel (Ni) to form an unconventional Ni@TiOx catalyst for...

In heterogeneous catalysis, the catalytic dehydrogenation reactions of hydrocarbons often exhibit a negative pressure dependence on hydrogen due to the competitive chemisorption of hydrocarbons and hydrogen. However, some catalysts show a positive pressure dependence for propane dehydrogenation, an important reaction for propylene production. Here we show that the positive activity dependence o...

[朝闻天下]天津大学发布重要研究成果 化工原料丙烯生产工艺实现新突破 (cctv.cn)Wei Wang, Sai Chen, Chunlei Pei, Ran Luo, Jiachen Sun, Hongbo Song, Guodong Sun, Xianhui Wang, Zhi-Jian Zhao, and Jinlong Gong*, "Tandem Propane Dehydrogenation and Surface Oxidation Catalysts for Selective Propylene Synthesis," Science 2023.  https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi3416  

Xin Chang, Zhi-Jian Zhao, Zhenpu Lu, Sai Chen, Ran Luo, Shenjun Zha, Lulu Li, Guodong Sun, Chunlei Pei, and Jinlong Gong*, "Designing Single-Site Alloy Catalysts using a Degree-of-isolation Descriptor," Nature Nanotechnol. 2023.  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-023-01344-z 

​Propane dehydrogenation (PDH) is a commercial propylene production technology that has received much attention, but high reaction temperatures result in a decrease of propylene selectivity and catalyst stability. This paper describes a single-site [PtZn4] catalyst by assembling atomically ordered intermetallic alloy (IMA) as a selective and ultrastable PDH catalyst. The catalyst enables more ...

Tuning the facet exposure of Cu could promote the multi-carbon (C2+) products formation in electrocatalytic CO2 reduction. Here we report the design and realization of a dynamic deposition-etch-bombardment method for Cu(100) facets control without using capping agents and polymer binders. The synthesized Cu(100)-rich films lead to a high Faradaic efficiency of 86.5% and a full-cell electricity ...

O2 electroreduction (CO2 ER) using renewable energy is ideal for mitigating the greenhouse effect and closing the carbon cycle. Bicarbonate (HCO3−) is most commonly employed as the electrolyte anion because it is known to facilitate CO2 ER. However, its dynamics in the electric double layer remains obscure and requires more in-depth investigation. Herein, we investigate the refined reduction p...

Cu‐based electrocatalysts can effectively facilitate carbon dioxide electrochemical reduction (CO2ER) to produce multi‐carbon products. However, the roles of Cu0 and Cu+ and the mechanistic understanding remain elusive. This paper describes the controllable construction of Cu0-Cu+ sites derived from the well‐dispersed cupric oxide supported on copper phyllosilicate lamella to enhance CO2ER p...

Bimetallic nanoparticle catalysts attract extensive attention for relevant catalysis processes due to their flexible structures, while the structure evolution under specific conditions is ambiguous. This paper describes the structure evolution of Pt-Sn bimetallic nanoparticles for catalytic dehydrogenation, especially Sn segregation for surface recovery of a Pt-Sn alloy. An acid etching-reducti...

Prof. Jinlong Gong and Prof. Chunlei Pei are invited to comment on a newly published article on Science, which is reported by Peter C. Stair and Justin M. Notestein from Northwestern University.“The methodology exemplifies the strategy of mediating the transport of key intermediates across various catalytic sites and integrating multiple reactions sequentially.”The comment: https://science.sc...

Modulating lattice oxygen in metal oxides that conducts partial oxidation of methane in balancing C-H activation and syngas selectivity remains challenging. This paper describes the discovery of distorting FeO6 octahedra in La1-xCexFeO3 (x=0, 0.25 0.5, 0.75, 1) orthorhombic perovskites for the promotion of lattice oxygen activation. By combined electrical conductivity relaxation (ECR) measureme...

​The grain boundary in copper-based electrocatalysts has been demonstrated to improve the selectivity of solar-driven electrochemical CO2 reduction towards multi-carbon products. However, the approach to form grain boundaries in copper is still limited. This paper describes a controllable grain growth of copper electrodeposition via poly (vinylpyrrolidone) used as an additive. A grain-boundary...

Foreign element doping could improve the charge transport of photoelectrodes, however, new recombination centers may be introduced. This paper describes a facile photoetching approach that alleviates the negative effects from bulk defects by confining the oxygen vacancy (O vac) at the surface of BiVO4 photoanode, via a 10‐minute photoetching. This strategy could induce enriched O vac at the su...

The active sites of heterogeneous catalysts can be difficult to identify and understand, and, hence, the introduction of active sites into catalysts to tailor their function is challenging. During the past two decades, scaling relationships have been established for important, heterogeneous catalytic reactions. More specifically, a physical or chemical property of the reaction system, termed as...

Silicon-based (Si-based) junctions have been widely investigated in recent years as photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting photoelectrodes, including buried junctions and metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) Schottky junctions. However, Si-based MIS photoelectrodes suffer from low performance for PEC oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) because of the dilemma...

Oxygen chemistry plays a pivotal role in numerous chemical, energy and environmental systems. Particularly, selective cleavage of C–H bonds by metal oxo species is highly desirable in the catalytic dehydrogenation of light alkanes. However, high selectivity of alkene is usually hampered through consecutive oxygenation reactions in conventional oxidative dehydrogenation (ODH) scheme. Herein, we...

The peroxone reaction between O3 and H2O2 has been deemed a promising technology to resolve the increasingly serious water pollution problem by virtue of the generation of superactive hydroxyl radicals (•OH), but it suffers greatly from an extremely limited reaction rate constant under acidic conditions (ca. less than 0.1 M–1 s–1 at pH 3). This article describes a heterogeneous catalyst comp...

Identification of the active structure under reaction condition is of great importance for rational design of heterogeneous catalysts, but which is often hampered due to their structural complexity. This paper describes the interplay between the surface structure of Co3O4 and the CO2 hydrogenation reaction. Experimental results combined with theoretical calculations show that the Co3O4 with mor...

A correct description of active sites is the precondition towards reaction mechanism study and catalyst screening. In many cases, high-symmetry and ideally ordered crystalline surfaces are used to represent the reactive sites. However, reaction-induced surface segregation and restructuring weaken the rationality of simply employing the suggested most stable surfaces. This paper describes an est...