Designing Ceria/Alumina for Efficient Trapping of Platinum Single Atoms

Cerium oxide (ceria) has been shown to be very effective at trapping platinum atoms due to formation of stable surface complexes at step edges, where coordinatively unsaturated cerium cations are present. But ceria loses its effectiveness when heated to high temperatures due to loss of surface area and growth in particle size associated with sintering of the oxide. Being a rare earth, and with limited supplies worldwide, it is important to develop methods to improve the effectiveness of ceria as a catalyst support. Here, we explore the performance for trapping Pt atoms when the ceria is supported on a high surface area alumina carrier. This helps create a more sustainable catalyst formulation, especially if we can retain the high dispersion of Pt seen on ceria supports. For this work, we studied the atom trapping efficacy of ceria/alumina samples with increasing ceria content (8–50 wt %) and contrasted the behavior with pure ceria. Electron microscopy reveals that when dispersed on alumina, ceria is present in the form of crystalline nanoparticles and isolated cerium ions. These two forms of ceria differ markedly in their ability to trap Pt atoms. Atomically dispersed cerium is present in the form of Ce3+ cations on alumina; however, this form of ceria is not effective for trapping Pt atoms. Our results show that the atom-trapped Pt resides primarily on crystalline ceria nanoparticles. CO oxidation was used as a probe reaction to evaluate the performance of these PtAT/ceria-alumina catalysts. We conclude that over the range of ceria loadings we investigated, 50% ceria/alumina represents the optimal catalyst support for achieving high surface area and atom trapping efficiency while helping reduce the total ceria content in this catalyst system.