This paper reports a study on nanocrystalline ceria powder prepared by high energy ball-milling and combustion synthesis methods. The combustion synthesis was carried out using ceric ammonium nitrate as oxidizer and citric acid, glycine or citric acid plus glycine as fuel. The minimum crystallite size of ceria powder is obtained by combustion synthesis of ceric ammonium nitrate and citric acid....

Doped ceria is considered as an electrolyte for solid oxide fuel cell applications. The introduction of dopants in the ceria lattice will affect its electronic structure and, in turn, its ionic conductivity. Simulation of these issues using density functional theory becomes complicated by the random distribution of the constituent atoms. Here we use the generalized gradient approximation with o...

Palladium supported on high-surface-area ceria effectively catalyzes the hydrogenation of phenol to cyclohexanone at atmospheric pressure and room temperature. Activation of H2 at Pd sites and phenol at surface ceria sites was investigated by probing the redox properties of the catalyst and studying the mechanism of phenol adsorption. Temperature-programmed reduction and pulsed chemisorption we...

This paper demonstrates the key role of the property-structure relationship of the support on iron/ceria catalysts on the hydrocarbon selectivity and olefin-to-paraffin ratio for the direct hydrogenation of carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons. The effect is directly related to the reducibility of the different nanostructured ceria supports and their interaction with the iron particles. Herein, we ...

Conventional supported metal catalysts are metal nanoparticles deposited on high surface area oxide supports with a poorly defined metal-support interface. Typically, the traditionally prepared Pt/ceria catalyzes both methanation (H2/CO to CH4) and water-gas shift (CO/H2O to CO2/H2) reactions. By using simple nanochemistry techniques, we show for the first time that Pt or PtAu metal can be crea...

Copper oxide supported on ceria has been investigated for the selective hydrogenation of octadecanoic acid to octadecanol. At reaction conditions of 5 bar H2 at 250 C, 75 % alcohol yield with 100 % selectivity can be achieved. The Cu species formed under the experimental conditions and ceria support likely show synergy for the selective hydrogenation of acids into alcohols.

The structural, chemical and electronic changes of ceria as a function of decreasing particle size have been studied: at sizes below 5 nm the total amount of reducible oxygen dramatically increases due to superoxide formation on the ceria surface, a result indicative of a size dependent oxygen buffering capacity.

Three CuO/CeO2 catalyst with different morphologies of ceria, namely nanospheres, nanorods and nanocubes, were synthesized and used to catalyze the water-gas shift (WGS) reaction. The reactivity tests showed that the Cu supported on the ceria nanospheres exhibited both the highest activity and superior stability when compared with the nanocube and nanorod ceria catalysts. Operando X-ray diffrac...