(6lr) Novel Nanostructured Transition Metal Oxides for Catalysis.

Transition metal oxides (TMOs) have been the subject of growing interest in the catalysis community in the past decades owing to their low cost as a great alternative for precious metals and excellent catalytic performance. Their unique electronic structure of the outer d-electrons has offered them versatile abilities for optical, electrical and catalytical property engineering. The high oxygen mobility in TMOs also gives rise to easy stoichiometry tuning, heteroatoms doping as well as modifications of electronic band structures, making property control more feasible. In addition, TMOs possess high structural tunability thus allowing for the synthesis of various nanostructures with different dimensionalities ranging from 0D to 3D. In this work, a variety of facile wet synthetic approaches, such as soft templating, hard templating and template free, will be exploited to controllably synthesize novel TMO nanomaterials including copper oxide, iron oxides and manganese oxides with different nanodimensionalities. These nanomaterials and their composites were well characterized and understood via an assortment of tools including SEM/TEM/AFM, XRD/XPS/XAFS/XRF, FTIR/UV-VIS/UV-DRS/NMR/EPR/PL, ultrafast facilities transient absorption, and BET physisorption/chemisorption etc. Temperature programmed reactions such as TPR (reduction) /TPO (oxidation) /TPD (desorption) were used to study the reductive/oxidative/desorptive behaviors of these catalysts. To investigate their catalytic performance, a combination of straight gas phase catalysis and photocatalysis will be explored including CO2 hydrogenation via reverse water gas shift route (rWGS) for iron oxides and manganese oxides, methane catalytic combustion, direct Z-scheme photocatalytic water splitting that’s enabled by ultrafast interfacial charge transfer, etc. In addition, first principle computations will be highly coupled with our experimental results in order to guide the catalyst designs and mechanistic understandings. The core of this work will be hypothesis-driven, enlightening from TMO structural and computational studies, and application-oriented in a sense of seeking fascinating properties.

Teaching Interests:

The candidate obtained her bachelor degree in Chemistry in 2016 and will be awarded a doctorate degree in Chemical Engineering in 2020. She is looking for a post-doctorate position and shows strong interests in teaching but not limited to the following subjects: Thermodynamics; Kinetics and Reaction Engineering; Nanomaterial synthesis and characterization; Physical Chemistry; Heterogeneous Catalysis; Photocatalysis; Electronic Materials; Lab courses.