Exploring highly active and cost-effective catalysts for styrene epoxidation is of great significance, but it remains challenging to simultaneously achieve excellent conversion and selectivity toward styrene oxide. In this work, the structures and performance of Co, Fe, and Cu single-atom catalysts (SACs) in styrene epoxidation with tert-butyl hydroperoxide (TBHP) are predicted using density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The results reveal that the Co-N structure prefers that of styrene oxide over Fe-N and Cu-N structures. This predicted result is verified via catalytic evaluations, where the Co SACs displayed significantly higher styrene oxide selectivity than Fe and Cu SACs. Moreover, the activity of Co SAC can be further improved by the construction of unsaturated vacancy-defect cobalt single sites. As a result, excellent performance with styrene conversion of 99.9% and styrene oxide selectivity of 71% is achieved after a reaction time of 8 h on the optimal Co SAC.
Keywords: cobalt; single-atom catalysts; styrene epoxidations; styrene oxide; tert-butyl hydroperoxide.