Simultaneously Boosting Catalyst Activity and Stability by Construction of Low-Temperature Strong Metal−Support Interaction

The strong metal−support interaction (SMSI) is of great importance for supported metal catalysts in heterogeneous catalysis. Typically, the occurrence of SMSI is beneficial to a catalyst's stability while detrimental to its catalytic activity because the high-temperature treatment required for the construction of SMSI and the excessive encapsulation of metal nanoparticles by the support caused by SMSI often result in a significant decrease of the number of active sites. To solve this problem, this work reports a low-temperature SMSI on Pt/TiO2 induced by sodium borohydride reduction which is accompanied by a weak encapsulation degree of the Pt nanoparticles. All of the characteristics of this SMSI are consistent with those of the classical SMSI, and the key to its construction is the (weak) reduction of the support at room temperature. It was found that this low-temperature SMSI construction strategy is general, which can be expanded to other TiO2-supported metals such as Au/TiO2, and its inducing condition can be extended to other methods that can reduce the support at low temperatures, such as the decomposition of hydrazine hydrate. Owing to the low-temperature SMSI, both the catalytic activity and the reusability of the catalysts for nitrobenzene hydrogenation were significantly improved. This discovery supplies a facile strategy for the construction of SMSI under mild conditions and provides a way for the design of reusable supported catalysts with improved catalytic activity.