Conspectus
Heterogeneous
catalysis is the workhorse of the chemical industry,
and a heterogeneous catalyst possesses numerous active sites working
together to drive the conversion of reactants to desirable products.
Over the decades, much focus has been placed on identifying the factors
affecting the active sites to gain deep insights into the structure-performance
relationship, which in turn guides the design and preparation of more
active, selective, and stable catalysts. However, the molecular-level
interplay between active sites and catalytic function still remains
qualitative or semiquantitative, ascribed to the difficulty and uncertainty
in elucidating the nature of active sites for its controllable manipulation.
Hence, bridging the microscopic properties of active sites and the
macroscopic catalytic performance, that is, microscopic-to-macroscopic
transition, to afford a quantitative description is intriguing yet
challenging, and progress toward this promises to revolutionize catalyst
design and preparation.
In this Account, we propose mesokinetics
modeling, for the first
time enabling a quantitative description of active site characteristics
and the related mechanistic information, as a versatile tool to guide
rational catalyst design. Exemplified by a pseudo-zero-order reaction,
the kinetics derivation from the Pt particle size-sensitive catalytic
activity and size-insensitive activation energy suggests only one
type of surface site as the dominant active site, in which the Pt(111)
with almost unchanged turnover frequency (TOF111) is further
identified as the dominating active site. Such a method has been extended
to identify and quantify the number (N
i) of active sites for various thermo-, electro-, and photocatalysts
in chemical synthesis, hydrogen generation, environment application,
etc. Then, the kinetics derivation from the kinetic compensation effects
suggests a thermodynamic balance between the activation entropy and
enthalpy, which exhibit linear dependences on Pt charge. Accordingly,
the Pt charge can serve as a catalytic descriptor for its quantitative
determination of TOFi. This strategy has been further applied
to Pt-catalyzed CO oxidation with nonzero-order reaction characteristic
by taking the site coverages of surface species into consideration.
Hence, substituting the above statistical correlations of N
i and TOFi into the rate equation R = ∑N
i
× TOF
i
offers the mesokinetics
model, which can precisely predict catalytic function and screen catalysts.
Finally, based on the disentanglement of the factors underlying Pt
electronic structures, a de novo strategy, from the interfacial charge
distribution to reaction mechanism, kinetics, and thermodynamics parameters
of the rate-determining step, and ultimately catalytic performance,
is developed to map the unified mechanistic and kinetics picture of
reaction. Overall, the mesokinetics not only demonstrates much potential
to elucidate the quantitative interplay between active sites and catalytic
activity but also provides a new research di...