Size effect on atomic structure in low-dimensional Cu-Zr amorphous systems

Effects of Promoter’s Composition on the Physicochemical Properties of Cu/ZnO/Al2O3-ZrO2 Catalyst

Cu/ZnO catalysts were synthesized via an impregnation method on an Al2O3-ZrO2 support and modified by the addition of manganese and niobium as promoters. The effect of the selected promoters on the physicochemical properties and performance toward the hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol are presented in this paper. The Mn and Nb promoters improved the reducibility of the catalyst as evidenced by the shifting of the H2-TPR peaks from 315 °C for the un-promoted catalyst to 284 °C for the Mn- and Nb-promoted catalyst. The catalytic performance in a CO2 hydrogenation reaction was evaluated in a fixed-bed reactor system at 22.5 bar and 250 °C for 5 h. Amongst the catalysts investigated, the catalyst with equal ratio of Mn and Nb promoters exhibited the smallest particle size of 6.7 nm and highest amount of medium-strength basic sites (87 µmol/g), which resulted in the highest CO2 conversion (15.9%) and methanol selectivity (68.8%).

Localization model description of the interfacial dynamics of crystalline Cu and Cu64Zr36 metallic glass films

Recent studies of structural relaxation in Cu-Zr metallic glass materials having a range of compositions and over a wide range of temperatures and in crystalline UO₂ under superionic conditions have indicated that the localization model (LM) can predict the structural relaxation time τ_α of these materials from the intermediate scattering function without any free parameters from the particle mean square displacement ⟨r²⟩ at a caging time on the order of ps, i.e., the "Debye-Waller factor" (DWF). In the present work, we test whether this remarkable relation between the "fast" picosecond dynamics and the rate of structural relaxation τ_α in these model amorphous and crystalline materials can be extended to the prediction of the local interfacial dynamics of model amorphous and crystalline films. Specifically, we simulate the free-standing amorphous Cu₆₄Zr₃₆ and crystalline Cu films and find that the LM provides an excellent parameter-free prediction for τ_α of the interfacial region. We also show that the Tammann temperature, defining the initial formation of a mobile interfacial layer, can be estimated precisely for both crystalline and glass-forming solid materials from the condition that the DWFs of the interfacial region and the material interior coincide.