Authors: Juanjuan Yang, Zhiyang Cao, Yujie Wan, Shuhui Guan, Bo Jiang, Yusuke Yamauchi, Hexing Li
Published: 2024-12-16
Source: Full article
AbstractDry reforming of methane (DRM) represents an important way to convert both CO2 and CH4 to reduce greenhouse effects and produce valuable chemical products. Owing to the strong bonding energies of both CO2 and CH4 molecules, DRM usually proceeds at a high temperature, which inevitably causes catalyst sintering, leading to catalyst deactivation. This work develops a highly stable sub‐nanometer Ru catalyst on a Ni‐doped MgO support using Mg2+ vacancies as anchors. The optimized Ru1.5/Ni1‐MgO‐R catalyst displays 90% CH4 conversion and 92% CO2 conversion to syngas in DRM at 800 °C. More importantly, it exhibits strong durability and can run continuously for more than 1200 h. Both the characterizations and the density functional theory (DFT) calculations demonstrate that the Ni2+ substituted Mg2+ in the MgO matrix produces Mg2+ vacancies (MgV), which can stabilize sub‐nanometer Ru clusters of ≈0.9 nm. Moreover, the presence of Mgv‐Ru8 clusters strongly stabilizes sub‐nanometer Ru. This study contributes valuable insights into the design of sub‐nanometer metal catalysts with strong sintering resistance at high temperatures.