Sabatier principle of metal-support interaction for design of ultrastable metal nanocatalysts

Rational design of stable nanocatalysts Sintering of nanoparticles is one of the main causes of their catalytic deactivation. Rational design of nanocatalysts that are stable against sintering is a grand challenge in heterogenous catalysis. Hu et al . present kinetic theories for two competing sintering mechanisms, Ostwald ripening and particle migration, which relate the rates of both processes to fundamental interaction energies in metal nanoparticle-support combinations. Using kinetic simulations for hundreds of such pairs, the authors show a universal volcano dependence of the sintering kinetics on the metal-support binding energy that can serve as a single descriptor to predict nanoparticle growth rates. The revealed scaling relations are a good start in the development of high-throughput screening computational approaches to drive discovery of sintering-resistant nanocatalysts. —YS