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Chinese researchers created a yolk-shell system with an iron-supporting carbon shell that envelops a palladium-supporting metal–organic framework
Chinese chemists have hatched yolk-shell nanostructures that they say are the first to integrate different metals as single atom catalysts to achieve a tandem synthesis. ‘Our design concept is an important step to simulating enzyme catalysis or activation of inert chemical bonds,’ says Yuen Wu from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei.
In the nanostructure’s inner yolk layer, Wu and colleagues embed single palladium atoms on a metal organic framework (MOF). In its outer layer, they embed iron in a nitrogen-doped carbon shell. Under electrolysis, the catalysts couple alkenes and nitroaromatic compounds, after iron atoms and oxygen epoxidise the former and palladium atoms and hydrogen reduce the latter. They have developed eight catalysts, the main one having an equal ratio of iron to palladium.