Becky Greenaway, Associate Professor (Reader) and Royal Society University Research Fellow at Imperial College London, talks to Nature Synthesis about developing automated high-throughput experimentation to design porous liquids as well as persistent challenges in the field.
Margarida Costa Gomes, CNRS Research Professor at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, talks to Nature Synthesis about understanding the molecular behaviour of porous liquids and the challenges of translating that understanding into functional materials.
Developing catalysts that can support high metal loadings (>10 wt%) that are resistant to sintering under harsh reaction conditions remains a fundamental challenge. Here we present a reticular coordination strategy to maximize precious metal utilization where Pt atoms are anchored onto Ce-oxo clusters within metal–organic frameworks and then converted into PtRC/CeOx (where RC denotes reticular coordination) by calcination, yielding catalysts with high atomic dispersion (14.9 wt%). Upon high-temperature (>300 °C) treatment under H2, the isolated Pt species do not undergo uncontrolled sintering; instead, their migration is suppressed after limited restructuring into flat, strongly confined ultrasmall clusters. Using the treated material (0.15 mgPt cm‒2) in proton exchange membrane water electrolysers results in a degradation rate of 25 μV h‒1, which outperforms 40 wt% Pt/C (106 μV h‒1 at 0.40 mgPt cm‒2) and retains its structural integrity after 500 h at 1 A cm‒2. A reticular coordination strategy is developed in which coordinating one Pt atom per Ce-oxo cluster in a metal–organic framework before calcination yields ceria containing 14.9 wt% atomically dispersed Pt. The resulting lattice confinement inhibits migration and suppresses sintering under harsh reducing conditions.
