Improved performance of supported single-atom catalysts via increased surface active sites

• Hollandite manganese oxide nanoparticles (HMONPs) with high surface area are synthesized.
• Ag metal is atomically dispersed on the HMONP's surfaces to form Ag1/HMONP.
• Ag1/HMONP shows high catalytic performance in low-temperature CO oxidation.
• The enhanced catalytic performance is due to the increasing number of active sites.

Noble metals atomically dispersed and exclusively exposed on support's surfaces are desirable for improving catalytic performance, but fabrication of this kind of catalysts remains challenging. Herein we synthesize two atomically dispersed silver catalysts with hollandite manganese oxide (HMO) nanorods and HMO nanoparticles as supports. The HMO nanoparticles have abundant surface oxygen-terminated hollow sites, which allow all silver atoms to be anchored on surfaces, resulting in higher performance in catalytic oxidation than the other catalyst with the HMO nanorod support, which only exposes a fraction of silver atoms on the surfaces. Several characterization techniques are used to establish structure-activity correlations.

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