The Impact of Metal-Support Interaction on the Structure and Activity of Carbon-Supported Ni Nanoparticle Catalysts for Alkaline Hydrogen Oxidation Reaction.

The effect of the carbon support─Ketjenblack (C) and Vulcan (C)─on the Ni/C catalyst properties toward alkaline hydrogen oxidation reaction (HOR) was investigated. Both Ni/C and Ni/C presented improved catalytic activity with an increase in Ni particle size; however, Ni/C showed activity significantly higher than that of Ni/C at the same particle size. The reason for the difference in the HOR activity due to the types of carbon support was revealed to be the difference in the 3D structure of Ni nanoparticles determined by metal-support interaction, which is changed by the surface structures of carbon supports.

Atomic-Scale 3D Structure of a Supported Pd Nanoparticle Revealed by Electron Tomography with Convolution Neural Network-Based Image Inpainting.

Electron tomography based on scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) is used to analyze 3D structures of metal nanoparticles on the atomic scale. However, in the case of supported metal nanoparticle catalysts, the supporting material may interfere with the 3D reconstruction of metal nanoparticles. In this study, a deep learning-based image inpainting method is applied to high-angle annular dark field (HAADF)-STEM images of a supported metal nanoparticle to predict and remove the background image of the support.