Studies on Catalytic Activity of Hydrogen Peroxide Generation according to Au Shell Thickness of Pd/Au Nanocubes

Abstract

The catalytic properties of materials are determined by their electronic structures, which are based on the arrangement of atoms. Using precise calculations, synthesis, analysis, and catalytic activity studies, we demonstrate that changing the lattice constant of a material can modify its electronic structure and therefore its catalytic activity. Pd/Au core/shell nanocubes with a thin Au shell thickness of 1 nm exhibit high H2O2 production rates due to their improved oxygen binding energy (ΔE O) and hydrogen binding energy (ΔE H), as well as their reduced activation barriers for key reactions.

Electrocatalytic Synthesis of Hydrogen Peroxide over Au/TiO2 and Electrochemical Trace of OOH* Intermediate

“…[9c] Correspondingly, the adsorption of oxygen will not be strong, and the binding of O* intermediates will also weaken, which is beneficial for the two-electron process. [17] A schematic diagram of the process is shown in Figure 2d. The ORR process includes oxygen adsorption, activation, and reduction processes.…”

Advanced Development Strategy of Nano Catalyst and DFT Calculations for Direct Synthesis of Hydrogen Peroxide

“…Palladium-based bimetallic catalysts were investigated for the development of next-generation catalysts. The literatures report the following categories of catalyst: noble-metal-containing bimetallic systems, such as PdPt, PdAu, and PdAg; [35][36][37][38] those with uncommon metal components, such as PdTe, PdSn, PdIn, and PdGa; [12,[39][40][41][42][43][44] and transition-metal-based systems, such as PdCo, PdNi, and PdNiO. [45][46][47] Among them, there is no doubt that the PdAu bimetallic system is the most well-known and prominent composition.…”

“…[49] Kim et al layered gold atoms on cubic palladium nanoparticles to synthesize layer-separated Pd-Au cubic core@shell nanoparticles (Figure 3a-c). [35,36] When initiated from a palladium cube (similar to the aforementioned Pd cube), PVP (surfactant), l-ascorbic acid (reducing agent), and Au precursor were used to synthesize flat Au layers, exhibiting unexpected features. As the gold layer was ≈1 nm thick, it contained only 3-5 atomic layers (Figure 3b,c), which transformed the near-zero activities of general gold atoms into much-more energetic sites that is capable of producing H 2 O 2 .…”

Engineered Gold-Based Nanomaterials: Morphologies and Functionalities in Biomedical Applications. A Mini Review

“…As is well known, morphology plays a key role in gold-nanotechnology, especially in relation to the possibility of having materials with different symmetries (spheres, rods, and cubes) [1,2,3,4,12,24,28,70,71,72,73,74] or without a defined and reproducible symmetry (stars, hollow particles, and cages) [1,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84]. Highly symmetrical particles are the most studied because of their low dispersity and synthetic reproducibility, which assure the repeatability of experiments and results.…”

“…In the last decade, nanotechnology allowed for an improvement of materials properties in many application fields, such as sensing [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], optoelectronics [10,11,12,13,14,15], energy [16,17,18,19,20,21], catalysis [22,23,24] and biotechnology [25,26,27,28,29,30,31]. Gold was used to produce many different nanostructures through a bottom-up approach, such as spheres, rods, stars, cubes, hollow nanoparticles, and nanocapsules, widely used in biomedicine and reported in a schematic way in Figure 1.…”