Strong Metal–Support Interactions in Catalytic Oxidation of VOCs: Mechanistic Insights, Support Engineering Strategies, and Emerging Catalyst Design Paradigms

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) significantly impact air quality as photochemical smog precursors and health hazards. Catalytic oxidation is a leading VOC abatement method but suffers from catalyst deactivation due to metal sintering and competitive adsorption in complex mixtures. Strong metal–support interactions (SMSIs) provide atomic level control of interfacial electronic and geometric structures. SMSI enables bidirectional charge transfer, d band center modulation, oxygen vacancy generation, and tunable encapsulation that together promote O 2 activation, lower barriers, and impart thermal and chemical robustness. This review synthesizes mechanistic insights and recent progress in SMSI-enabled VOC oxidation, integrating in situ and operando probes with kinetics. Reactivity and selectivity across aromatics, alkanes, oxygenates, and chlorinated species are rationalized by SMSI-mediated tuning of adsorption and intermediate evolution. Practical levers include control of particle size and dispersion, core–shell architectures, metal loading, and support acidity or basicity. Emerging directions include single atom catalysts, high entropy alloys, and nonmetal supports. Key challenges concern the dynamic evolution of SMSI under realistic feeds and the scalable, reproducible synthesis of interfaces. Future developments combining in situ characterization with data-driven catalyst design hold promise for achieving durable, high-performance VOC abatement with reduced precious metal usage.