Quality or Quantity? How Structural Parameters Affect Catalytic Activity of Iron Oxides for CO Oxidation

<The replacement of noble metal catalysts by abundant iron as an active compound in CO oxidation is of ecologic and economic interest. However, improvement of their catalytic performance to the same level as state-of-the-art noble metal catalysts requires an in depth understanding of their working principle on an atomic level. As a contribution to this aim, a series of iron oxide catalysts with varying Fe loadings from 1 to 20 wt% immobilized on a γ-Al2O3 support is presented here, and a multidimensional structure–activity correlation is established. The CO oxidation activity is correlated to structural details obtained by various spectroscopic, diffraction, and microscopic methods, such as PXRD, PDF analysis, DRUVS, Mössbauer spectroscopy, STEM-EDX, and XAS. Low Fe loadings lead to less agglomerated but high percentual amounts of isolated, tetrahedrally coordinated iron oxide species, while the absolute amount of isolated species reaches its maximum at high Fe loadings. Consequently, the highest CO oxidation activity in terms of turnover frequencies can be correlated to small, finely dispersed iron oxide species with a large amount of tetrahedrally oxygen coordinated iron sites, while the overall amount of isolated iron oxide species correlates with a lower light-off temperature.