Reviewed by Lexie CornerJan 30 2025
A research team led by Professor Bruce Gates at the UC Davis Department of Chemical Engineering has developed highly efficient and stable platinum catalysts for hydrogenation reactions. Their findings were published in Nature Chemical Engineering.
Platinum is a useful as a catalyst for industrial chemistry. UC Davis researchers have developed a new technique to trap clusters of a few platinum atoms (white arrow on right) in nanometer-scale islands of cerium oxide (yellow circle) on a silica surface. The method could be used to produce more efficient and robust catalysts. Image Credit: Yizhen Chen, UC Davis.
Platinum and other noble metals accelerate chemical reactions, particularly hydrogenation—the process of adding hydrogen atoms to a molecule.
Previous studies showed that platinum clusters in small, nanoscale formations outperform individual platinum atoms and larger nanoparticles as hydrogenation catalysts. However, these clusters tend to aggregate into larger particles over time, reducing their efficiency.
To address this challenge, Yizhen Chen, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Gates Catalysis Research Group, refined an approach that Jingyue Liu (now at Arizona State University) proposed to stabilize platinum clusters. The method "traps" platinum clusters on nanoscale cerium oxide islands supported by a silica substrate, creating isolated reaction environments that prevent aggregation.
Chen, Gates, and their collaborators demonstrated that these confined platinum clusters not only exhibited high catalytic activity in ethylene hydrogenation but also maintained stability under rigorous reaction conditions.
This approach offers a promising strategy for designing durable and highly active catalysts with applications in the chemical industry.
The research received partial funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Journal Reference:
Chen, Y., et al. (2025) Stabilizing supported atom-precise low-nuclearity platinum cluster catalysts by nanoscale confinement. Nature Chemical Engineering. doi.org/10.1038/s44286-024-00162-x.