Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• BEHRENS, Malte
• STUDT, Felix
• TOVAR, Michael
• FISCHER, Richard W
• NØRSKOV, Jens K
• SCHLÖGL, Robert
• KASATKIN, Igor
• KÜHL, Stefanie
• HÄVECKER, Michael
• ABILD-PEDERSEN, Frank
• ZANDER, Stefan
• GIRGSDIES, Frank
• KURR, Patrick
• KNIEP, Benjamin-Louis

Titel

The Active Site of Methanol Synthesis over Cu/ZnO/Al2O3 Industrial Catalysts

Ist Teil von

• Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 2012-05, Vol.336 (6083), p.893-897

Ort / Verlag

Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Quelle

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• One of the main stumbling blocks in developing rational design strategies for heterogeneous catalysis is that the complexity of the catalysts impairs efforts to characterize their active sites. We show how to identify the crucial atomic structure motif for the industrial Cu/ZnO/Al(2)O(3) methanol synthesis catalyst by using a combination of experimental evidence from bulk, surface-sensitive, and imaging methods collected on real high-performance catalytic systems in combination with density functional theory calculations. The active site consists of Cu steps decorated with Zn atoms, all stabilized by a series of well-defined bulk defects and surface species that need to be present jointly for the system to work.