LAUSR

We are so honored to present a special issue on the topic of ‘‘metal-based materials for energy catalysis’’ as Guest Editors of the journal Rare Metals. It showcases most recent research advances on metal-based energy catalysis and provides review and outlook for this area. The exhaustion of fossil energy drives the ongoing development of renewable energy conversion and storage. Featured by many intrinsic advantages, metal-based catalysts are key to the development of energy conversion and storage devices and have been at the center of extensive and intensive studies in the past few decades. Researches on metal-based catalysts have spanned from metallic alloys to oxides and nitrides, from nanoparticles to nanowires, nanosheets and frame-like morphologies, from porous structure to core/ shell structure, etc. Still, there are a wide variety of challenges in terms of scientific fundamentals and practical application yet to be solved. The Rare Metals special issue presents a collection of reviews and research articles focusing on metal-based materials for energy catalysis. It includes two reviews and nine research articles dedicated to the frontiers of metalbased catalysis, from rational design of various highly active catalysts to mechanistic analysis of structure–performance relationship. It is right time to launch a single issue centering on catalysis by noble metal and transition metal-based materials. The comprehensive reviews as well as insightful original researches will offer new path to resolving challenging questions and open up new possibilities for emerging and interesting research areas. Porous materials with high surface area and hierarchically ordered structure have proven to be beneficial for heterogeneous catalysis. One review discussed in detail four typical kinds of metal catalysts, i.e., metal oxides, porous metals, metal nanoparticles supported on metal– organic frameworks (MOFs) and zeolites from the aspects of synthetic approaches and catalytic applications [1]. The other review focused on single nanoparticle–nanoscale shell structures including core–shell and yolk–shell, and multiple nanoparticles embedded in nanoscale shells [2]. Nanoscale shell layers with tunable physicochemical properties are advantageous in that they are able to inhibit thermal sintering and particle aggregation, and that they improve reaction kinetics by facilitating diffusion of molecules. In order to address the drawback of corrosion of carbon black support that usually leads to the activity decay of Pt catalyst, one article presented the hybrid support consisting of TiN nanoparticles with good chemical stability and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with good electronic conductivity [3]. The atomic layer deposition (ALD) approach was employed to deposit TiN nanoparticles onto CNTs; the hybrid support was then used to load Pt nanoparticles to obtain Pt@TiN/CNTs catalyst. The strong electron transfer as well as chemical coupling between Pt and TiN was S.-J. Guo* Department of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China e-mail: [email protected]