Facile synthesis of CuO nanorods with abundant adsorbed oxygen concomitant with high surface oxidation states for CO oxidation

Oxygen adsorption materials play an important role in catalysis. However, the conventional catalytic mechanism of CO oxidation over copper oxide-based catalysts is based on lattice-oxygen oxidation processes, which neglects the significance of the oxidizability of the copper component and the adsorbed oxygen. Herein, we propose that poorly-crystallized CuO nanorods are capable of adsorbing abundant oxygen along with increasing the Cu oxidation states to close to 3+, meaning that CO catalytic oxidation occurs directly on the adsorbed oxygen and that Cu oxidation states do not fall to 1+ during catalytic reactions. The rate-controlled step is the surface oxidizability of the CuO nanorods, which increases with increasing temperature and oxidizability of the environment involved. These catalytic processes are distinctly different from the conventional case. The unique oxygen adsorption and catalytic properties of the CuO nanorods originate from the increasing trend in Cu oxidation state in the p-type CuO, enhanced by the defect structures and coarse surfaces of the sample. Such structure and morphology characteristics are closely related to the liquid membrane growing environment, which induces poor crystallization of the nanorods. The characterization methods include scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Raman spectroscopy, and Fourier transformation infrared spectroscopy (FTIR).