Highly Selective Reduction of Carbon Dioxide to Methane on Novel Mesoporous Rh Catalysts.

Mesoporous metals with high surface area hold promise for a variety of catalytic applications, especially for the reduction of CO2 to value-added products. This study has used a novel mesoporous rhodium (Rh) nanoparticles, which were recently developed via a simple wet chemical reduction approach ( Nat. Commun. 2017, 8, 15581) as catalyst for CO2 methanation. Highly efficient performance and selectivity for methane formation are achieved due to their controllable crystallinity, high porosity, high surface energy, and large number of atomic steps distributions. The mesoporous Rh nanoparticles, possessing the largest surface area (69 m2 g-1), exhibit a substantially higher reaction rate (5.28 × 10-5 molCO2 gRh-1 s-1) than the nonporous Rh nanoparticles (1.28 × 10-5 molCO2 gRh-1 s-1). Our results indicate the extensive use of mesoporous metals in heterogeneous catalysis processes.