No abstract

Rational design of stable nanocatalysts Sintering of nanoparticles is one of the main causes of their catalytic deactivation. Rational design of nanocatalysts that are stable against sintering is a grand challenge in heterogenous catalysis. Hu et al . present kinetic theories for two competing sintering mechanisms, Ostwald ripening and particle migration, which relate the rates of both processes to fundamental interaction energies in metal nanoparticle-support combinations. Using kinetic simulations for hundreds of such pairs, the authors show a universal volcano dependence of the sintering kinetics on the metal-support binding energy that can serve as a single descriptor to predict nanoparticle growth rates. The revealed scaling relations are a good start in the development of high-throughput screening computational approaches to drive discovery of sintering-resistant nanocatalysts. —YS