Challenges with atomically dispersed supported metal catalysts: controlling performance, improving stability, and enhancing metal loading

Abstract

Atomically dispersed supported metal catalysts offer opportunities of maximum utilization of expensive noble metals and provide unprecedented catalytic properties. Thus, these novel materials have received tremendous attention, especially in the last decade. Notwithstanding their advantages and such rapidly growing interest, these novel materials face various challenges, which need to be overcome to make them industrially viable. One of these challenges is the limited ability to control their catalytic properties. Changing the ligand environment, which also includes the support, varying the metal nuclearity, and the use of promoters (also including ionic liquid sheets) have shown to offer broad opportunities for tuning the catalytic performance. The other challenges are mostly related with the limited stability of the active species under reaction conditions, which also limits the metal loadings on the support surfaces. Control of electronic structure on the metal sites and the use of functional groups on support surfaces have been shown to be effective in this direction. In this chapter, some of the recent approaches aiming at overcoming these challenges related with the atomically dispersed supported metal catalysts are presented.