Understanding and Manipulating the Spillover Effects in Heterogeneous Catalysis

Many heterogeneous catalysts contain more than one type of active site. These sites may cooperate to steer a reaction toward desired pathways. However, the inter-site communication has been less studied. This is mainly due to the lack of fabrication methods for well-defined catalytic architectures with spatially separated active sites, where different reactants can be activated separately. In order to better understand the site cooperation effect, we proposed a novel catalytic architecture, where two sites are spatially separated by a partition layer, which allows selective permeation of certain reactants (e.g., H2). The study was focused on hydrogen and oxygen spillover effects.