High temperature shockwave stabilized single atoms

Yonggang Yao; Zhennan Huang; Pengfei Xie; Lianping Wu; Lu Ma; Tangyuan Li; Zhenqian Pang; Miaolun Jiao; Zhiqiang Liang; Jinlong Gao; Yang He; Dylan Jacob Kline; Michael R Zachariah; Chongmin Wang; Jun Lu; Tianpin Wu; Teng Li; Chao Wang; Reza Shahbazian-Yassar; Liangbing Hu

doi:10.1038/s41565-019-0518-7

High temperature shockwave stabilized single atoms

Nat Nanotechnol. 2019 Sep;14(9):851-857. doi: 10.1038/s41565-019-0518-7. Epub 2019 Aug 12.

Authors

Yonggang Yao¹, Zhennan Huang², Pengfei Xie³, Lianping Wu⁴, Lu Ma⁵, Tangyuan Li¹, Zhenqian Pang⁴, Miaolun Jiao¹, Zhiqiang Liang¹, Jinlong Gao¹, Yang He⁶, Dylan Jacob Kline⁷, Michael R Zachariah⁷, Chongmin Wang⁶, Jun Lu⁵, Tianpin Wu⁸, Teng Li⁹, Chao Wang¹⁰, Reza Shahbazian-Yassar¹¹, Liangbing Hu¹²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.
² Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
³ Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
⁴ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.
⁵ X-ray Science Division and Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA.
⁶ Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA.
⁷ Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.
⁸ X-ray Science Division and Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA. twu@anl.gov.
⁹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. lit@umd.edu.
¹⁰ Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA. chaowang@jhu.edu.
¹¹ Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. rsyassar@uic.edu.
¹² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. binghu@umd.edu.

PMID: 31406363
DOI: 10.1038/s41565-019-0518-7

Abstract

The stability of single-atom catalysts is critical for their practical applications. Although a high temperature can promote the bond formation between metal atoms and the substrate with an enhanced stability, it often causes atom agglomeration and is incompatible with many temperature-sensitive substrates. Here, we report using controllable high-temperature shockwaves to synthesize and stabilize single atoms at very high temperatures (1,500-2,000 K), achieved by a periodic on-off heating that features a short on state (55 ms) and a ten-times longer off state. The high temperature provides the activation energy for atom dispersion by forming thermodynamically favourable metal-defect bonds and the off-state critically ensures the overall stability, especially for the substrate. The resultant high-temperature single atoms exhibit a superior thermal stability as durable catalysts. The reported shockwave method is facile, ultrafast and universal (for example, Pt, Ru and Co single atoms, and carbon, C₃N₄ and TiO₂ substrates), which opens a general route for single-atom manufacturing that is conventionally challenging.