Strain-Induced Cu-LaO_x Strong Interaction Structures for Tandem Catalytic Upgrading of Ethanol

Metal-oxide strong interaction (MOSI) structures are ideal arrangements of active sites to facilitate multistep reactions in a tandem manner. Up to date, however, the choice of metal oxides used to construct MOSI structures is limited to reducible oxides for most of the currently available synthesis strategies, significantly restricting the application scope of MOSI catalysts. Herein, an innovative strain-induced strategy is proposed to construct metal-irreducible oxide strong interaction catalysts. A Cu-LaOx/C catalyst can be directly achieved by reducing copper nitrate on lanthanum atomically loaded mesoporous carbon at 450 °C under argon. Combining the experimental characterization and the first-principles calculations, the La atoms are found to be favorable to locate outside the Cu nanoparticle due to the dominant strong strain effect between Cu and La atoms. The resulting Cu-LaOx/C MOSI structure exhibited excellent performance in tandem catalytic upgrading of ethanol with the product selectivity of C4–C8 alcohols over 70% at an ethanol conversion of about 40% and the robust catalytic activity for more than 120 h in gas-phase catalytic ethanol conversion at 250 °C and 2 MPa. This work offers an alternative formation mechanism for the MOSI structure catalyst.