Direct Operando Visualization of Metal Support Interactions Induced by Hydrogen Spillover During CO Hydrogenation

The understanding of catalyst active sites is a fundamental challenge for the future rational design of optimized and bespoke catalysts. For instance, the partial reduction of Ce surface sites to Ce and the formation of oxygen vacancies are critical for CO hydrogenation, CO oxidation, and the water gas shift reaction. Furthermore, metal nanoparticles, the reducible support, and metal support interactions are prone to evolve under reaction conditions; therefore a catalyst structure must be characterized under operando conditions to identify active states and deduce structure-activity relationships. In the present work, temperature-induced morphological and chemical changes in Ni nanoparticle-decorated mesoporous CeO by means of in situ quantitative multimode electron tomography and in situ heating electron energy loss spectroscopy, respectively, are investigated. Moreover, operando electron energy loss spectroscopy is employed using a windowed gas cell and reveals the role of Ni-induced hydrogen spillover on active Ce site formation and enhancement of the overall catalytic performance.