Surface-Specific Catalytic Activity of Carbon Nanotube Encapsulated with Metal-Oxide Clusters

It is first attempted to demonstrate the catalytic efficiency and structure-sensitivity reactions on the surface of carbon nanotube (CNT) encapsulated with metal oxide particle. The results shows that the encapsulated nanoparticle CuO activate the outer orbits of CNT, and hence the surface of CuO@CNT is chemically active for hydroxyl radical generation. The results obtained from DFT calculation and experiments verified the highly active of CuO@CNT catalysts for the generation of hydroxyl radicals, and the structure-sensitivity for the oxidation of dichlorophenol. This suggests a novel strategy to design well-defined interfaces, controlling the structure-sensitivity reaction, can hence markedly improve the performance of catalysts.