Atmospheric pressure solvothermal synthesis of ceria-zirconia solid solutions and their large oxygen storage capacity

Ceria-zirconia solid solution has a function as an oxygen storage material, which keeps air to fuel ratio (A/F) on a stoichiometric composition at the surface of three-way catalyst (TWC) for automotive exhaust. When A/F could be kept stoichiometric, TWC shows good catalytic activity. At first, ceria which dissolves 20 mol% of zirconia was developed by Ozawa et al. in 1987. After that, the ceria-zirconia solid solution was improved to achieve a complete solubility in the solid state at nano-level by surfactant modified homogeneous coprecipitation (J catal 169:490, 1997). Nano-level solid solution of ceria and zirconia could have been made by various methods. Those materials have similar amount of oxygen storage capacity (OSC). The improvement of OSC comes from the larger amount of bulk oxygen that can contributes OSC by the larger amount of zirconia dissolving into ceria (Catal Lett 33(1-2):193-200 1995). Solvothermal synthesis is usually done in a higher temperature than that can be reached under atmospheric pressure. The higher temperature accelerates generation of precipitation; however, a pressure vessel is necessary, and such a hermetically closed system is unsuitable to the material synthesis of the low-value-added product. Atmospheric pressure solvothermal (APS) synthesis was applied to ceria-zirconia solid solutions in this study. The APS ceria-zirconia showed larger amount of OSC. The excellent OSC performance was presumed to come from further uniformity of zirconium ions in the ceria lattice.