Novel metal nanoparticles have been widely used as heterogeneous catalysts. However, due to their high surface area, they need to be stabilised to prevent them from agglomerating and maintain their small sizes. One method is to deposit them on high surface area metal oxides as metal nanoparticles support. Other than providing support, these metal oxides may influence the chemical properties of the nanoparticles, also known as metal-support interaction. This can be observed with cerium oxide supports1, although the fundamentals of this relationship are not thoroughly understood. This project is aimed at investigating the variation of metal-support interaction by changing the morphologies of the cerium oxide support. Altering the morphology allows for tuning the exposed crystal planes2. In this study, different morphologies of cerium oxide were synthesised and characterised. They were then loaded with Pd nanoparticles and their heterogeneous catalytic behaviour was compared. By complimenting these catalytic results with other analytical techniques such as temperature programmed reduction (TPR) and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS), the role of CeO2 as a metal nanoparticle support would be more fundamentally comprehended.

Morphologies of cerium oxide as palladium nanoparticles support for heterogeneous catalysis

248th National Meeting (2014)

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