Identification of Reaction Intermediates and Mechanistic Understandings of Methane Oxidation over Hematite: A Combined Experimental and Theoretical Study.

Effective methane utilization for either clean power generation or value-added chemical production has been a subject of growing attention worldwide for decades, yet challenges persist mostly in relation to methane activation under mild conditions. Here, we report hematite, an earth-abundant material, to be highly effective and thermally stable to catalyze methane combustion at low temperatures (<500 °C) with a low light-off temperature of 230 °C and 100% selectivity to CO. The reported performance is impressive and comparable to those of precious-metal-based catalysts, with a low apparent activation energy of 17.

Catalytic manganese oxide nanostructures for the reverse water gas shift reaction.

Understanding the fundamental structure-property relationships of nanomaterials is critical for many catalytic applications as they comprise of the catalyst designing principles. Here, we develop efficient synthetic methods to prepare various MnO structures and investigate their catalytic performance as applied to the reverse Water Gas Shift (rWGS) reaction. We show that the support-free MnO derived from MnO 1D, 2D and 3D nanostructures are highly selective (100% CO to CO), thermally stable catalysts (850 °C) and differently effective in the rWGS.