- Li, Haoyi;
- Xiong, Chuanye;
- Fei, Muchun;
- Ma, Lu;
- Zhang, Hongna;
- Yan, Xingxu;
- Tieu, Peter;
- Yuan, Yucheng;
- Zhang, Yuhan;
- Nyakuchena, James;
- Huang, Jier;
- Pan, Xiaoqing;
- Waegele, Matthias M;
- Jiang, De-en;
- Wang, Dunwei
Atomically dispersed catalysts such as single-atom catalysts have been shown to be effective in selectively oxidizing methane, promising a direct synthetic route to value-added oxygenates such as acetic acid or methanol. However, an important challenge of this approach has been that the loading of active sites by single-atom catalysts is low, leading to a low overall yield of the products. Here, we report an approach that can address this issue. It utilizes a metal-organic framework built with porphyrin as the linker, which provides high concentrations of binding sites to support atomically dispersed rhodium. It is shown that up to 5 wt% rhodium loading can be achieved with excellent dispersity. When used for acetic acid synthesis by methane oxidation, a new benchmark performance of 23.62 mmol·gcat-1·h-1 was measured. Furthermore, the catalyst exhibits a unique sensitivity to light, producing acetic acid (under illumination, up to 66.4% selectivity) or methanol (in the dark, up to 65.0% selectivity) under otherwise identical reaction conditions.