UC Davis

Determining and controlling the uniformity of isolated metal sites on surfaces of supports are central goals in investigations of single-site catalysts because well-defined species provide opportunities for fundamental understanding of the surface sites. CO is a useful probe of surface metal sites, often reacting with them to form metal carbonyls, the infrared spectra of which provide insights into the nature of the sites and the metal-support interface. Metals bonded to various support surface sites give broad bands in the spectra, and when narrow bands are observed, they indicate a high degree of uniformity of the metal sites. Much recent work on single-site catalysts has been done with supports that are inherently nonuniform, giving supported metal species that are therefore nonuniform. Herein we summarize values of ν_CO data characterizing supported iridium gem-dicarbonyls, showing that the most nearly uniform of them are those supported on zeolites and the least uniform are those supported on metal oxides. Guided by ν_CO data of supported iridium gem-dicarbonyls, we have determined new, general synthesis methods to maximize the degree of uniformity of iridium species on zeolites and on MgO. We report results for a zeolite HY-supported iridium gem-dicarbonyl with full width at half-maximum values of only 4.6 and 5.2 cm^-1 characterizing the symmetric and asymmetric CO stretches and implying that this is the most nearly uniform supported single-site metal catalyst.