Vacancy‐Anchored Sub‐Nanometer Ru Catalyst with High Activity and Strong Durability at 800 °C Dry Reforming of Methane
Juanjuan Yang, Zhiyang Cao, Yujie Wan, Shuhui Guan, Bo Jiang, Yusuke Yamauchi, Hexing Li
Abstract
Abstract Dry reforming of methane (DRM) represents an important way to convert both CO 2 and CH 4 to reduce greenhouse effects and produce valuable chemical products. Owing to the strong bonding energies of both CO 2 and CH 4 molecules, DRM usually proceeds at a high temperature, which inevitably causes catalyst sintering, leading to catalyst deactivation. This work develops a highly stable sub‐nanometer Ru catalyst on a Ni‐doped MgO support using Mg 2+ vacancies as anchors. The optimized Ru 1.5 /Ni 1 ‐MgO‐R catalyst displays 90% CH 4 conversion and 92% CO 2 conversion to syngas in DRM at 800 °C. More importantly, it exhibits strong durability and can run continuously for more than 1200 h. Both the characterizations and the density functional theory (DFT) calculations demonstrate that the Ni 2+ substituted Mg 2+ in the MgO matrix produces Mg 2+ vacancies (Mg V ), which can stabilize sub‐nanometer Ru clusters of ≈0.9 nm. Moreover, the presence of Mg v ‐Ru 8 clusters strongly stabilizes sub‐nanometer Ru. This study contributes valuable insights into the design of sub‐nanometer metal catalysts with strong sintering resistance at high temperatures.