Volatile organic compounds (VOCs), derived from many industrial processes and residential activities, have caught increasing attention because of their severe effect on air quality and human health. Catalytic oxidation is considered as the most promising technology due to its high purification efficiency, low energy consumption, and few secondary products. The core issue for this approach is to design practical and efficient catalysts for VOCs oxidation at low temperature. Recently, much research has focused on improving the catalytic performance of transition metal oxides to replace noble metal catalysts due to its low cost, good thermal stability and toxic tolerance.
The degradation of VOCs on transition metal oxides is considered to mainly follow the Mars-van Krevelen (MvK) mechanism. A crucial step in this mechanism is VOCs molecules adsorbed on the surface of the catalyst and reacting with the surface lattice oxygen. Based on the reaction mechanism of VOCs, prof. Qingling Liu's team (http://catalysis.tju.edu.cn/) fabricated CoMn spinel oxides and further etching them with HNO3 solution to induce λ-MnO2 in-situ growing on the surface of CoMn spinel. Surprisingly, the obtained transition metal oxide catalyst showed excellent catalytic performance for a variety of typical VOCs (acetone, benzene, toluene, ethyl acetate, propane), and possessed satisfactory stability and water resistance. This strategy can activate surface lattice oxygen species through surface bond breaking caused by acid etching, which is expected to broaden the application of transition metal oxides in VOCs removal.
Relevant research results “Acid Etching-Induced In Situ Growth of λ-MnO2 over CoMn Spinel for Low-Temperature Volatile Organic Compound Oxidation” (DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.2c02483) have been published in the internationally renowned journal Environmental Science & Technology (IF:9.028). The first author of this paper is Postgraduate Cangpeng Shan, and the corresponding authors are Professor Qingling Liu and Doctor Qian Zhao.
Professor Qingling Liu's team is committed to the research in the field of air pollution control, and has made a series of achievements in volatile organic compounds treatment and mobile source tail gas treatment. In recent five years, the team has published more than 50 papers in international journals such as ACS Catal., Environ. Sci. Technol., Appl. Catal. B, Chem. Eng. J., Green Chem., ChemSusChem, Appl. Surf. Sci., Chemosphere, Langmuir and so on.
By: School of Environmental Science and Engineering
Editor: Qin MIan
