Morphological evolution of 2D Rh nanoplates to 3D Rh concave nanotents, hierarchically stacked nanoframes, and hierarchical dendrites

Abstract

Impurity doping has yielded a number of useful optical and catalytic alloy nanoparticles, by providing synthetic routes to unprecedented nanostructures. However, Zn is difficult to use as a dopant in alloy nanoparticles due to the difficulty in reduction, and therefore little has been reported on Zn-doped alloy nanoparticles and their potential applications. Herein we report an unusual role of the dopant Zn as a crystal growth modifying agent to cause the formation of novel concave Rh nanostructures, namely nanotents. We could further prepare unprecedented hierarchically stacked Rh nanoframes and dendritic nanostructures derived from them by understanding the role of various surface-stabilizing moieties. We also report the usage of new Rh nanostructures in selective hydrogenation of phthalimides.

Mesoporous metallic rhodium nanoparticles

“…Nanostructured Rh is ubiquitous in heterogeneous catalysis, playing a huge role in the refinement of petroleum, the production of fine chemicals and energy generation via fuel cell technology34353637. Increasing surface area has been a common strategy to improve the performance of catalysts38.…”

Carbon‐Free Nanocoral‐Structured Platinum Electrocatalyst for Enhanced Methanol Oxidation Reaction Activity with Superior Poison Tolerance

“…[12,13] Currently, the crucial challenging issues for fuel cells are cost reduction, enhanced durability, and reduced poisoning effects of the catalyst. Concerning these issues, extensive research has been performed with fascinating heterometallic surface structures such as mono-, bi-, tri-and quaternary metallic structures, [14,15] nanodendrites, [10,16] nanowiresnanorods, [17] nanotubes, [3] hollow coral, hollow cube, nanoflower, [18] core-shell structures, [19,20] tetrahedral, [21] and carbon-supported metal nanoparticles. [22] However, the design of these fascinating structures normally involves one-pot synthesis, [12] pulse electrodeposition, [23] electrochemical deposition, [24] the polyol method, and the microwave heating method.…”

One step synthesis of hierarchical dendritic Pt nanostructures with a concave Pt octahedron building unit via simultaneous vertex growth and facet etching

“…The growth of hierarchical dendritic structures with excellent structural orders usually requires seed mediated epitaxial growth. [7][8][9][10][11][12] The morphology control of nanocrystal seed and symmetry-directed growth direction control of the epitaxial layer should be carefully designed to accomplish the desired replication of the mother particle and daughter particles. One step generation of high symmetry hierarchical structures of a single metal component, however, is very rare.…”