Design of porous Ag platelet structures with tunable porosity and high catalytic activity

Abstract

Porous Ag structures have recently attracted great interest due to their unique characteristics, relatively low cost and good biocompatibility. Shape-, size-, porosity-, and crystallinity-controlled and surface defect tailored synthesis of porous metal materials is of scientific significance yet greatly underdeveloped because of the lack of rational design strategies. Here, a low cost and facile synthetic route is presented to produce regular porous Ag platelet structures with controlled size, porosity, crystallinity and surface defects by a two-step process. Initially, size-tailored regular Ag platelet precursors from 2.5 mm to 36 mm are obtained by merely adjusting the solution pH value; meanwhile D-glucose is introduced as a structure-directing agent. Subsequently, thermal treatment is performed to afford the porous Ag platelet structures. Simply by optimizing the annealing time, temperature and heating rate, porous Ag platelets with effectively tunable porosity, crystallinity and surface defects can be achieved. The porous Ag platelet structures could catalyze the reduction of p-nitrophenol and dyes quite effectively at room temperature, which is attributed to their regular morphologies, porosity, high surface-to-volume ratio, short diffusion length and good permeability. Moreover, these porous Ag platelet structures because of their unique morphology and network characteristics will exhibit excellent electrochemical catalytic activity, or act as outstanding electrodes, sensors, actuators, etc.

Facile Synthesis of Porous Hexapod Ag@AgCl Dual Catalysts for In Situ SERS Monitoring of 4-Nitrothiophenol Reduction

“…We adopted reported methods to synthesize hexapod Ag@AgCl microstructures [29]. For a typical synthesis of AgCl crystals, 300 µL of AgNO 3 solution (0.1 M) and 0.8 mL of DDA were added to 20 mL of EG and mixed well at room temperature.…”

“…Otherwise, porous Ag structures are also a valuable catalyst for reducing nitrophenols. Zou et al designed porous Ag platelet structures with tunable porosity, which have shown good catalytic performance for p-nitrophenol or dyes [29]. Although great progress has been achieved, the 3D Ag-based dendritic microstructure is usually synthesized by electrochemical methods [30] or a complex template/seed-mediated method [31].…”

Fabrication of a Flowerlike Ag Microsphere Film with Applications in Catalysis and as a SERS Substrate

“…For example, Nie and co‐workers obtained flowerlike silver hierarchical microcrystals with high catalytic activity by reducing silver nitrate with l ‐ascorbic acid in nitric acid‐mediated systems . Xu et al fabricated porous Ag platelet structures that exhibited excellent catalytic activity . Chang and co‐workers fabricated a thin Ag film into nanocrystals with various shapes including nanoflowers by cyclic scanning electrodeposition .…”

Ultrafast Laser-Induced Atomic Structure Transformation of Au Nanoparticles with Improved Surface Activity

“…M etallic nanoparticles (NPs) have been widely investigated because of their extensive application in the field of energy conversion, 1−4 biological therapy, 5 and environmental remediation. 6 Hydrogen fuel production from water mainly relies on hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) catalysts. 7 Currently, the insufficient supplies and high cost of Pt, which possesses the best surface activity, 8 severely limit their wide ranging applications.…”