Inkjet Printing Assisted Synthesis of Multicomponent Mesoporous Metal Oxides for Ultrafast Catalyst Exploration

Xiaonao Liu †, Yi Shen ‡, Ruoting Yang §, Shihui Zou†, Xiulei Ji , Lei Shi †, Yichi Zhang , Deyu Liu ,Liping Xiao †, Xiaoming Zheng †, Song Li ‡, Jie Fan*†, and Galen D. Stucky *

^† Department of Chemistry, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province 310027, China

^‡ Department of Mathematics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province 310027, China

^§ Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, United States

 Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, United States

Nano Lett., Article ASAP

DOI: 10.1021/nl302992q

Publication Date (Web): October 10, 2012

Copyright © 2012 American Chemical Society

We describe an inkjet printing assisted cooperative-assembly method for high-throughput generation of catalyst libraries (multicomponent mesoporous metal oxides) at a rate of 1 000 000-formulations/hour with up to eight-component compositions. The compositions and mesostructures of the libraries can be well-controlled and continuously varied. Fast identification of an inexpensive and efficient quaternary catalyst for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution is achieved via a multidimensional group testing strategy to reduce the number of performance validation experiments (25 000-fold reduction over an exhaustive one-by-one search).