The effect of CO treatment on the surface structure of bimetallic Pd-Au/HOPG and Pd-In/HOPG nanoparticles: A comparative study

Bimetallic nanoparticles have been attracting more and more attention as catalysts in recent years since they often provide improved catalytic performance when compared to their monometallic analogues. Trying to design the optimum configuration of active sites in such catalytic systems, researchers resort to different strategies, one of which consists of a specific pretreatment of pre-synthesized nanoparticles in a particular gaseous environment prior to the catalytic reaction, resulting in adsorption-induced segregation. However, such a strategy does not always lead to any significant changes in the surface structure, so the identification of all factors responsible for the segregation process is of high fundamental and applied interest for the targeted design of bimetallic catalytically active nanoparticles. Here we show that for two types of bimetallic nanosystems, a stoichiometric intermetallic compound of Pd and In, and a substitutional solid solution of Pd and Au, the exposure to a CO atmosphere leads to completely different results, i.e., a noticeable surface segregation of Pd atoms being observed exclusively for the latter system. Driven by adsorption of CO molecules, the process of segregation is enhanced in the studied Pd-Au/HOPG catalyst (initial Pd/Au ratio of 1.48) when the temperature of the CO treatment is increased to 150 °C. In contrast, the Pd-In/HOPG nanoparticles (initial Pd/In ratio of 1.35) show no considerable change in the apparent surface atomic composition under a CO atmosphere, irrespective of temperature. Our results, alongside previous findings, demonstrate that CO adsorption-induced segregation as a tool for target-oriented modification of active sites in bimetallic nanoparticles for catalytic applications is appropriate only for substitutional solid solutions having a reasonable number of contacts between atoms of one type prone to segregation. • CO adsorption induces Pd surface segregation in the model Pd-Au/HOPG catalyst. • Heating enhances CO adsorption-induced segregation in the Pd-Au/HOPG sample. • The surface structure of the Pd-In/HOPG sample is stable under a CO atmosphere. • The number of neighboring atoms of one type directly affects the segregation occurrence.