Journal
CHEMISTRY OF MATERIALS
Volume 24, Issue 16, Pages 3269-3278Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/cm301828n
Keywords
complex metal oxide; electron microscopy; crystallography; M2 phase
Funding
- King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
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The determination of the atomic structure of a functional material is crucial to understanding its structure-to-property relationship (e.g., the active sites in a catalyst), which is however challenging if the structure possesses complex inhomogeneities. Here, we report an atomic structure study of an important MoVTeO complex metal oxide catalyst that is potentially useful for the industrially relevant propane-based BP/SOHIO process. We combined aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy with synchrotron powder X-ray crystallography to explore the structure at both nanoscopic and macroscopic scales. At the nanoscopic scale, this material exhibits structural and compositional order within nanosized domains, while the domains show disordered distribution at the macroscopic scale. We proposed that the intradomain compositional ordering and the interdomain electric dipolar interaction synergistically induce the displacement of Te atoms in the Mo-V-O channels, which determines the geometry of the multifunctional metal oxo-active sites.
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