Recently,Liu Yonghong’s group from College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering has made new findings on the rsearch of attolitre droplets. The paper of Hydrodynamic dispensing and electrical manipulation of attolitre droplets got published by Nature Communication. The first author is Zhang Yanzhen, who was the doctor candidate of the university and now is the postdoctor of Oldenburg University. The third author is prof. Liu Yonghong.
Propylene oxide (PO) as a versatile chemical intermediate is used to synthesize derivatives such as polyurethane foams and propylene glycol. Traditional chlorohydrin and hydroperoxidation processes to produce PO usually suffer from environmental or economical problems. Since Haruta et al. reported an alternative process for PO production (i.e., direct propene epoxidation with H2 and O2) using Au/TiO2 catalysts, this environmentally benign, sustainable and simple process has attracted immense research interests.
However, the main problem that hinders the industrialization of this process is the fast deactivation. To solve this problem, the group of Chaohe Yang proposed a strategy to tune the location of gold nanoparticles on zeolite, and studied the deactivation mechanism, relation between Au location and catalytic performance. As a result, they found that micropore blocking is the main deactivation mechanism and successfully deposit Au nanoparticles on the external surface to avoid this pore-blocking deactivation. This designed catalyst shows significantly enhanced catalytic performance. This simple strategy to enhance catalytic stability sheds new light on the ways to design novel materials in many areas such as catalysis, environment protection and energy conversion.
Natur communication is an open access journal that publishes high-quality research in biology, physics, chemistry, Earth sciences, and all related areas. the impact factor reaches11.39 in 2015-2016.
Editor: Bu Lingduo
Source: UPC News Center
