Correlation between catalytic activity of supported gold catalysts for carbon monoxide oxidation and metal–oxygen binding energy of the support metal oxides

Abstract

The effect of a wide variety of metal oxide (MOx) supports has been discussed for CO oxidation on nanoparticulate gold catalysts. By using typical co-precipitation and deposition–precipitation methods and under identical calcination conditions, supported gold catalysts were prepared on a wide variety of MOx supports, and the temperature for 50% conversion was measured to qualitatively evaluate the catalytic activities of these simple MOx and supported Au catalysts. Furthermore, the difference in these temperatures for the simple MOx compared to the supported Au catalysts is plotted against the metal–oxygen binding energies of the support MOx. A clear volcano-like correlation between the temperature difference and the metal–oxygen binding energies is observed. This correlation suggests that the use of MOx with appropriate metal–oxygen binding energies (300–500 kJ/atom O) greatly improves the catalytic activity of MOx by the deposition of Au NPs.