Designing catalysts to formic acid oxidation reaction: From nanoscale to single atoms

Abstract

Formic acid oxidation reaction (FAOR), as the anodic reaction in direct formic acid fuel cells, has attracted much attention but increasing the mass activity and stability of catalysts still face a bottleneck to meet the requirements of practical applications. In the past decades, researchers developed many strategies to fix these issues by improving the structure of catalysts and the newly raised single atom catalysts (SACs) show the high mass activity and stability in FAOR. This review first summarized the reaction mechanism involved in FAOR. The mass activity as well as stability of catalysts reported in the past five years have been outlined. Moreover, the synthetic strategies to improve the catalytic performance of catalysts are also reviewed in this work. Finally, we proposed the research directions to guide the rational design of new FAOR catalysts in the future.

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