Morphology-dependent interfacial interactions of Fe2O3 with Ag nanoparticles for determining the catalytic reduction of p-nitrophenol.

In this work, we fabricated three kinds of Ag/Fe2O3 model catalysts with different morphologies to study the interfacial interactions between Ag and Fe2O3, and how they affected the catalytic activity in hydrogenation of p-nitrophenol was explored. The hydrothermal method was used to synthesize the metal oxide supported silver catalyst, with various morphologies including nanoplates (NPs), nanospheres (NSs), and nanocubes (NCs). The crystal structure, morphology and surface elements of the composite were investigated by various measurements, such as X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The catalytic activity was also evaluated by the reduction of p-nitrophenol to p-aminophenol. It was found that the activities of the above catalysts varied with the morphology of the support. Among them, Ag/Fe2O3 NPs promoted the highest performance, Ag/Fe2O3 NSs were slightly inferior, and Ag/Fe2O3 NCs were the worst. At last, we ascribed the remarkable activity of Ag/Fe2O3 NPs to the strong metal-support interactions between Ag and Fe2O3.