Abstract
Single-atom catalysts (SACs) enable greener and more economically sustainable chemical production by significantly improving thermocatalysis efficiency and selectivity through maximized atom utilization and highly homogeneous metal coordination environments. Unfortunately, SACs are fundamentally constrained by the stability owing to the severe aggregation of single atoms, especially under the high-temperature thermocatalysis operations, which compromises the overall catalytic performance. Here, we report a synthetic strategy to realize the highly thermal-stable SACs resistance to sintering at harsh conditions through harnessing the inherent metal affinity and fluidity of liquid metal. A stable liquid metal-active metal interaction is formed, profiting from the superior metal affinity of liquid metal. Combined with the fluidity of liquid metal, active metal atoms can move but remain confined to the liquid metal as the metallic single-atom state at high temperatures. This catalyst exhibits outstanding thermal durability for ethane dehydrogenation, sustaining stable operation for over 100 h at 650 °C with an impressive ethylene selectivity of 98%. The strategy of constructing stable metal-metal interactions by utilizing the inherent metal affinity and dynamic fluidity of liquid metal will pave a practical way for the design of highly thermal-stable SACs.
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Acknowledgements
The research was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (22025303 to L.F., 22502148 to C.Y.W., and 52572035 to M.Q.Z.), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2042025kf0007 to L.F.), the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of CPFS (GZB20240567 to C.Y.W.), the cooperation and exchange program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22461160283 to F.D.), and the research program from Suzhou Laboratory (SK-1502-2024-055 to F.D.). We thank the Center for Electron Microscopy at Wuhan University for their substantial support of TEM work. We thank the Core Facility of Wuhan University for the measurement of inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometry, XPS, TEM, and the Core Research Facilities of the College of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences at Wuhan University for the XRD and PDF characterizations. We also thank the BL11B beamline of the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility for the XAFS characterization.
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L.F. conceived the research concept. L.F., M.Q.Z. supervised the research. Z.Y.Z., C.Y.W. carried out the main experiments, collected and analyzed the data. F.D. supervised the theoretical calculations, and M.J.S. performed the computational simulations. M.Y.D., X.T., D.L., and D.H.Z. contributed to the catalytic performance evaluation. S.Y.H. contributed to sample preparation and data analysis. Z.J.L., Y.S.M. processed the XAFS results. Y.L.Z. performed transmission electron microscopy characterizations. L.L. contributed to the in situ XRD characterizations. L.F., M.Q.Z., Z.Y.Z., C.Y.W., and M.J.S. cowrote the manuscript. All the authors contributed to data analysis and scientific discussion.
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Zeng, Z., Wang, C., Sun, M. et al. Liquid metal dispersed single-atom catalyst with high-temperature stability. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70476-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70476-2
