Natural Minerals and Biomass for Environment/Energy Catalysis

Dear Colleagues,

Natural minerals and biomass are earth-abundant materials in the world. Due to their unique properties, including high surface area, functional groups, unique microstructure and active sites, they have great potential in catalysis for CO₂ reduction, N₂ fixation, H₂ generation, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) degradation, wastewater treatment and so forth. They can serve as support or even become involved in the reaction through reconstruction or surface modification. The introduction of minerals/biomass as support could not only significantly reduce the application cost of catalysts, but also effectively avoid the agglomeration of nano-scale catalysts in the application process, which increase the number of active sites, and improve the catalytic efficiency. Over the past years, there has been increasing interest in the development of natural minerals/biomass that can enhance the catalytic performance. However, further improvement of the efficiency of these materials is still needed to fulfil the requirements for large-scale applications.

To facilitate diverse catalytic conversion, numerous efforts have been made towards rational design and controllable construction of novel composites with unique architectures. Particularly, mineral-/biomass-based composites constructed from diverse minerals/biomass can provide opportunities of achieving intriguing properties and enhance performance, benefiting from the synergistic effects at the composite interface. In addition, the role of natural minerals/biomass in composite catalysis, especially the co-catalytic mechanism, still needs to be explored.  Hence, this Special Issue aims to demonstrate the recent advancement of natural mineral/biomass materials with various structures to address the challenges in environmental and energy applications.

Prof. Dr. Xiazhang Li
Guest Editor

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