The photocatalytic conversion of carbon dioxide with water into methane is an appealing approach, which allows the transformation of carbon dioxide into a carbon-neutral fuel by harvesting solar energy.  Despite the promising future, this approach has faced a grand challenge in terms of reaction activity and selectivity.  To address this challenge, the research group led by Prof. XIONG Yujie at the University of Science and Technology of China has combined synchrotron radiation-based X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy characterization and in-situ infrared spectroscopy detection to examine bimetallic palladium-copper structures.  The investigation has discovered that the isolation of copper sites in palladium lattice can tune the adsorption configuration of CO₂ and the d-band center of catalyst, which promotes the conversion selectivity of carbon dioxide to methane.  This design enables the conversion selectivity of carbon dioxide to methane at 96%, and works for visible-responsive photocatalysts.  This work provides fresh insights into the catalytic site design for selective photocatalytic carbon dioxide conversion, and highlights the importance of catalyst lattice engineering at atomic precision to catalytic performance.  It has been published in Journal of the American Chemical Society (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2017, 139, 4486).

Selective conversion of carbon dioxide based on the lattice engineering of catalytic sites in photocatalysts