Dr. Chiranjib Majumder

Chemistry Division,

Bhabha Atomic research Centre

E-mail id:chimaju[at]barc.gov.in

Brief Bio-sketch:

Since 1992 I am working at BARC as a scientific officer. My research interest is to understand the structure-property relations of low dimensional (0D, 1D, and 2D) materials.

Rational design of Single atom alloy catalyst for SO₃ decomposition

Catalysts consisting of metal atoms that are atomically dispersed on supports are gaining wide attention because of the rapidly developing understanding of their structures and functions using advanced experimental tools. In this context single atom alloy (SAA) catalysts are extremely promising because of their exceptional tunability [1]. These catalysts are viewed as an alloy of a single metal atom in an inert host metal nanoparticle.

In this presentation I shall briefly describe the versatility of SAA catalysts in various reactions along with our present work on SO₃ decomposition. Recently, we have demonstrated the superior catalytic behavior of SO₃ decomposition by a novel single Ag atom alloy Pt catalyst in the sub-nanometer length scale (AgPt₉[at]Al₂O₃) [2]. It is found that alloying the alumina-supported platinum nanocluster with a single Ag atom lowers the activation barrier for S-O bond breaking by more than 50% in comparison to the platinum counterpart. Activation barrier of SO₃ dissociation by AgPt₉[at]Al₂O₃ is 0.52 eV, which is the lowest of any platinum based catalyst reported so far. In addition, it is also shown that the binding of the AgPt₉ catalyst with Al₂O₃ support is stronger than the Pt₁₀ cluster thereby makes the SAA catalyst more resistant to the sintering problem of only Pt based catalyst.

References :

1. Georgios Giannakakis, Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulos, and E. Charles H. Sykes; Acc. Che. Res. 2019, 52, 237.
2. S. Nigam, C. Majumder; Nanoscale, 2018, 10, 20599.