NO Reduction Over Noble Metal Ionic Catalysts

In last 40 years, catalysis for NO _x removal from exhaust gas has received much attention to achieve pollution free environment. CeO₂ has been found to play a major role in the area of exhaust catalysis due to its unique redox properties. In last several years, we have been exploring an entirely new approach of dispersing noble metal ions in CeO₂ and TiO₂ for redox catalysis. We have extensively studied Ce_1−x M _x O_2−δ (M = Pd, Pt, Rh), Ce_1−x−y A _x M _y O_2−δ (A = Ti, Zr, Sn, Fe; M = Pd, Pt) and Ti_1−x M _x O_2−δ (M = Pd, Pt, Rh, Ru) catalysts for exhaust catalysis especially NO reduction and CO oxidation, structure–property relation and mechanism of catalytic reactions. In these catalysts, lower valent noble metal ion substitution in CeO₂ and TiO₂ creates noble metal ionic sites and oxide ion vacancy. NO gets molecularly adsorbed on noble metal ion site and dissociatively adsorbed on oxide ion vacancy site. Dissociative chemisorption of NO on oxide ion vacancy leads to preferential conversion of NO to N₂ instead of N₂O over these catalysts. It has been demonstrated that these new generation noble metal ionic catalysts (NMIC) are much more catalytically active than conventional nano crystalline noble metal catalysts especially for NO reduction.