Highly Dispersed RuOOH Nanoparticles on Silica Spheres: An Efficient Photothermal Catalyst for Selective Aerobic Oxidati
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ARTICLE
Cite as Nano-Micro Lett. (2020) 12:41 Received: 8 November 2019 Accepted: 23 December 2019 © The Author(s) 2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40820-020-0375-9
Highly Dispersed RuOOH Nanoparticles on Silica Spheres: An Efficient Photothermal Catalyst for Selective Aerobic Oxidation of Benzyl Alcohol Qilin Wei1, Kiersten G. Guzman1, Xinyan Dai1, Nuwan H. Attanayake1, Daniel R. Strongin1, Yugang Sun1 * * Yugang Sun, [email protected] Department of Chemistry, Temple University, 1901 North 13th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA
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HIGHLIGHTS • Ultrasmall RuOOH nanoparticles of 2–3 nm are loaded on submicron silica spheres and capable of activating molecular oxygen. • Photothermal conversion efficiency of the supported RuOOH nanoparticles is nearly unity. • Photothermal effect promotes selective oxidation of benzyl alcohol under the illumination of visible light.
ABSTRACT Photothermal catalysis represents a promising strategy to utilize the renewable energy source (e.g., solar energy) to drive chemical reactions more efficiently. Successful and efficient photothermal catalysis relies on the availability of ideal photothermal catalysts, which can provide both large areas of catalytically active surface and strong light absorption power simultaneously. Such duplex requirements of a photothermal catalyst exhibit opposing dependence on the size of the catalyst nanoparticles, i.e., smaller size is beneficial for achieving higher surface area and more active surface, whereas larger size favors the light absorption in the nanoparticles. In this article, we report the synthesis of ultrafine RuOOH nanoparticles with a size of 2–3 nm uniformly dispersed on the surfaces of silica (SiOx) nanospheres of hundreds of nanometers in size to tackle this challenge of forming an ideal photothermal catalyst. The ultrasmall RuOOH nanoparticles exhibit a large surface area as well as the ability to activate adsorbed molecular oxygen. The S iOx nanospheres exhibit strong surface light scattering resonances to enhance the light absorption power of the small RuOOH nanoparticles anchored on the SiOx surface. Therefore, the RuOOH/SiOx composite particles represent a new class of efficient photothermal catalysts with a photothermal energy conversion efficiency of 92.5% for selective aerobic oxidation of benzyl alcohol to benzylaldehyde under ambient conditions. KEYWORDS Ultrasmall RuOOH nanoparticles; Photothermal catalyst; Selective aerobic oxidation; Light antenna effect; Light scattering resonance
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1 Introduction Selective aerobic oxidation of primary alcohols to corresponding aldehydes is of great interest in the chemical synthesis industry because of the environment-friendly and cost-effective features [1–4]. The high bond dissociation energy of α-C–H and weak oxidizing power of molecular oxygen ( O2) lead to challenges for successful reactions under mild ambient conditions [5–8]. The promising solution relies on the use of appropriate catalysts and elevated temperatures (80–120 °C, if
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