(560gw) Novel Nanostructured Transition Metal Oxides for Catalysis

Transition metal oxides (TMOs) have been the subject of growing interest in the catalysis community in the past decades owing to their low cost as a great alternative for precious metals and excellent catalytic performance. Their unique electronic structure of the outer d-electrons has offered them versatile abilities for optical, electrical and catalytical property engineering. The high oxygen mobility in TMOs also gives rise to easy stoichiometry tuning, heteroatoms doping as well as modifications of electronic band structures, making property control more feasible. In addition, TMOs possess high structural tunability thus allowing for the synthesis of various nanostructures with different dimensionalities ranging from 0D to 3D. In this work, a variety of facile wet synthetic approaches, such as soft templating, hard templating and template free, will be exploited to controllably synthesize novel TMO nanomaterials including copper oxide, iron oxides and manganese oxides with different nanodimensionalities. These nanomaterials and their composites were well characterized and understood via an assortment of tools including SEM/TEM/AFM, XRD/XPS/XAFS/XRF, FTIR/UV-VIS/UV-DRS/NMR/EPR and BET physisorption/chemisorption etc. Temperature programmed reactions such as TPR (reduction) /TPO (oxidation) /TPD (desorption) were used to study the reductive/oxidative/desorptive behaviors of these catalysts. To investigate their catalytic performance, a combination of straight gas phase catalysis, electrocatalysis and photocatalysis will be explored including CO₂ hydrogenation via reverse water gas shift route (rWGS) for iron oxides and manganese oxides, CO₂ electroreduction for CuO, photocatalytic water splitting for iron oxides and CuO, etc. In addition, first principle computations will be highly coupled with our experimental results in order to guide the catalyst designs and mechanistic understandings. The core of this work will be hypothesis-driven, enlightening from TMO structural and computational studies, and application-oriented in a sense of seeking fascinating properties.