Strengthening the Metal-Acid Interactions by Using CeO2 as Regulators of Precisely Placing Pt Species in ZSM-5 for Furfural Hydrogenation

Understanding the synergism between the metal site and acid site is of great significance in boosting the efficiency of bi-functional catalysts in many heterogeneous reactions, particularly in biomass upgrading. Herein, a "confined auto-redox" strategy is reported to fix CeO2-anchored Pt atoms on the inner wall of a ZSM-5 cage, achieving the target of finely controlling the placements of the two active sites. Compared with the conventional surface-supported counterpart, the encapsulated Pt/CeO2@ZSM-5 catalyst possesses remarkably-improved activity and selectivity, which can convert >99% furfural into cyclopentanone with 97.2% selectivity in 6 h at 160 °C. Besides the excellent catalytic performance, the ordered metal-acid distribution also makes such kind of catalyst an ideal research subject for metal-acid interactions. The following mechanization investigation reveals that the enhancement is strongly related to the unique encapsulation structure, which promotes the migration of the reactants over different active sites, thereby contributing to the tandem reaction.

Spatial Structure Design of Thioether-Linked Naphthoquinone Cathodes for High-Performance Aqueous Zinc-Organic Batteries

Organic electrode materials (OEMs) have gathered extensive attention for aqueous zinc-ion batteries (AZIBs) due to their structural diversity and molecular designability. However, the reported research mainly focuses on the design of the planar configuration of OEMs and does not take into account the important influence of the spatial structure on the electrochemical properties, which seriously hamper the further performance liberation of OEMs. Herein, this work has designed a series of thioether-linked naphthoquinone-derived isomers with tunable spatial structures and applied them as the cathodes in AZIBs. The incomplete conjugated structure of the elaborately engineered isomers can guarantee the independence of the redox reaction of active groups, which contributes to the full utilization of active sites and high redox reversibility. In addition, the position isomerization of naphthoquinones on the benzene rings changes the zincophilic activity and redox kinetics of the isomers, signifying the importance of spatial structure on the electrochemical performance. As a result, the 2,2'-(1,4-phenylenedithio) bis(1,4-naphthoquinone) (p-PNQ) with the smallest steric hindrance and the most independent redox of active sites exhibits a high specific capacity (279 mAh g-1 ), an outstanding rate capability (167 mAh g-1 at 100 A g-1 ), and a long-term cycling lifetime (over 2800 h at 0.05 A g-1 ).