Polymer-Assisted Co-Assembly towards Synthesis of Mesoporous Titania Encapsulated Monodisperse PdAu for Highly Selective Hydrogenation of Phenylacetylene

Bimetallic nanoalloys have attracted great research interest in the past decades by virtue of their tunable metal-metal synergies. The preparation of well-defined bimetallic nanoalloys largely relies on the use of capping ligands, which brings a great challenge to utilize the surface-accessible active sites and/or tailor bimetallic-support interactions. In the current paper, surface-clean, thermally stable and monodisperse PdAu nanoalloys confined in mesoporous TiO2 (PdAu@mTiO(2)) were prepared using evaporation-induced self-assembly with two colloidal templates. The hydrogenation activity of PdAu@mTiO(2) was demonstrated to be approximately 6 times higher than that of PdAu nanoalloys supported on mesoporous silica due to the bimetallic-support interactions. Our method is expected to open up new opportunities to synthesize ligand-free and stable bimetallic nanoalloys with tailored bimetallic-support interactions for highly efficient catalysis.