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Synthesis of amorphous Pd-based nanocatalysts for efficient alcoholysis of styrene oxide and electrochemical hydrogen evolution

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Abstract

Amorphous nanomaterials with long-range disordered structures could possess distinct properties and promising applications, especially in catalysis, as compared with their conventional crystalline counterparts. It is imperative to achieve the controlled preparation of amorphous noble metal-based nanomaterials for the exploration of their phase-dependent applications. Here, we report a facile wet-chemical reduction strategy to synthesize various amorphous multimetallic Pd-based nanomaterials, including PdRu, PdRh, and PdRuRh. The phase-dependent catalytic performances of distinct Pd-based nanomaterials towards diverse catalytic applications have been demonstrated. Specifically, the usage of PdRu nanocatalysts with amorphous and crystalline face-centered cubic (fcc) phases can efficiently switch the ring-opening route of styrene oxide to obtain different products with high selectivity through alcoholysis reaction and hydrogenation reaction, respectively. Moreover, when used as an electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), the synthesized amorphous PdRh nanocatalyst exhibits low overpotential and high turnover frequency values, outperforming its crystalline fcc counterpart and most of the reported Pd-based HER electrocatalysts.

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Acknowledgements

H. Z. thanks the support from ITC via the Hong Kong Branch of National Precious Metals Material Engineering Research Center (NPMM), the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (No. 11301721), the Start-Up Grant (No. 9380100) and the grants (No. 1886921) from the City University of Hong Kong. This research used 7-BM of the National Synchrotron Light Source II, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Brookhaven National Laboratory under Contract (No. DE-SC0012704).

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Author notes

  1. Yiyao Ge, Jingjie Ge, Biao Huang, and Xixi Wang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Yiyao Ge, Biao Huang, Xixi Wang, Guigao Liu, Bo Chen, An Zhang, Qingbo Wa, Shiyao Lu, Lujiang Li, Qinbai Yun, Kuo Yuan, Qinxin Luo & Hua Zhang

  2. City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Biao Huang & Hua Zhang

  3. Shenzhen Research Institute, City University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, 518057, China

    Hua Zhang

  4. Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study & Energy Institute, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

    Jingjie Ge

  5. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    Jingjie Ge, Hongfei Cheng & Zhichuan J. Xu

  6. Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Xiang-Huan Shan

  7. National Synchrotron Light Source II, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, 11973, USA

    Lu Ma & Yonghua Du

  8. State Key Laboratory of New Ceramics & Fine Processing, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Guanghua Liu & Songmo Du

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  1. Yiyao Ge
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Correspondence to Hua Zhang.

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Synthesis of amorphous Pd-based nanocatalysts for efficient alcoholysis of styrene oxide and electrochemical hydrogen evolution

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Ge, Y., Ge, J., Huang, B. et al. Synthesis of amorphous Pd-based nanocatalysts for efficient alcoholysis of styrene oxide and electrochemical hydrogen evolution. Nano Res. 16, 4650–4655 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-5101-0

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