Perovskite Catalysts for Diesel Nitrogen Oxide Control: Recent Advances and Future Directions

Controlling diesel nitrogen oxide (NOx) exhaust remains challenging in terms of increasingly stringent emission standards, while soot and N2O formation in aftertreatment units add further constraints on catalyst selectivity and durability. Perovskite oxides (ABO3) have emerged as promising candidates due to their compositional flexibility, thermal robustness, and tunable redox/acid–base chemistry. This review summarizes recent advances of perovskite catalysts across key diesel NOx-control reactions, including NO oxidation, simultaneous NOx-soot removal, NH3-selective catalytic reduction (NH3-SCR), and N2O decomposition. We synthesize the links between A/B-site substitution, oxygen/cation defect engineering, and porous/morphology design regulate oxygen activation pathways, nitrate/nitrite chemistry, oxygen-vacancy dynamics, and surface acidity/basicity, thereby governing activity and selectivity. We further study deactivation mechanism and resistance strategies toward realistic exhaust components (H2O, SO2, etc.), hydrothermal aging, carbon deposition, and oxygen inhibition. Finally, we highlight opportunities that couple operando spectroscopy, kinetics, and theoretical calculations to enable descriptor-guided design of durable perovskite catalysts for practical diesel aftertreatment.