A novel synthetic strategy for the design of metal nanoparticles by extrusion of anionic chloride precursors from a porous copper chlorophosphate framework has been devised for the sustainable aerobic oxidation of vanillyl alcohol (4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzyl alcohol) to vanillin (4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde) using a one-step, base-free method. The precise nature of the Au, Pt and Pd species has been elucidated for the as-synthesized and thermallyactivated analogues, which exhibit fascinating catalytic properties when subjected to diverse activation environments. By 20 employing a combination of structural and spectroscopic characterization tools, it has been shown that analogous heat treatments have differing effects on extrusion of a particular metal species. The most active catalyst in this series of materials were the extruded Pt nanoparticles that were generated by reduction in H2, which exhibit enhanced catalytic behavior, when compared to its Au or Pd counterparts, for industrially-significant, aerobic oxidation reactions.

A cobalt–nickel sulfide composite electrode synthesized onto Ni foam through a facile thermal decomposition method showed remarkable activity towards electrocatalytic hydrogen production.

Cocatalysts, when loaded onto a water splitting photocatalyst, accelerate the gas evolution reaction and improve the efficiency of the photocatalyst. In this paper, we report that the efficiency of the photocatalyst is enhanced with an amorphous cobalt oxide cocatalyst. WO3 film, when loaded with amorphous or nanocrystalline Co3O4, shows an improvement of up to 40% in photocurrent generation and 34% in hydrogen gas evolution. The effect of cocatalyst crystallinity on performance was systematically studied, and we found that the photocurrent deteriorates with the conversion of the cocatalyst to highly crystalline phase at annealing temperature of 500 °C. The mechanism for this effect was studied in detail using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, and the enhancement effect produced by amorphous cocatalyst is attributed to the large density of unsaturated catalytically active sites in the amorphous material.