Hydrogenation and dehydrogenation reactions are central to the petrochemical, fine chemical, pharmaceutical, and food industries and are of increasing interest in energy production and storage technologies. Typical heterogeneous catalysts often involve noble metals and alloys based on platinum, palladium, rhodium and ruthenium. While these metals are active at modest temperature and pressure, they are not always completely selective and are expensive. We have previously demonstrated that single palladium or platinum atoms can convert the otherwise catalytically inert surface of an inexpensive metal into a highly selective and cost effective catalyst. In this talk I will describe our recent results that provide a direct link between the active site composition of NiAu alloys and their ability to activate and dehydrogenate alcohols. We used high resolution imaging to characterize the active sites and temperature programmed reaction spectroscopy to probe the chemistry. These studies benefit from our benchmarking work measuring the CO binding strength as well as the energy landscape for the interaction of hydrogen and oxygen on the alloys.

Nickel-gold single and multiple atom alloys; understanding the relationship between atomic geometry and chemical reactivity

251st National Meeting (2016)

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