Design of Ceria Catalysts for Low‐Temperature CO Oxidation

A catalyst active to carbon monoxide (CO) oxidation at low temperature is essential for environmental conservation, saving fuel and improvement of the quality of human life. Rational design of CO oxidation catalyst on the basis of comprehensive understanding of physicochemical properties of catalytic materials, rather than simply searching for the catalyst based on trial‐and‐error, is a promising approach to meet the increasingly stringent regulations. This review covers metal‐doped and ‐loaded system based on CeO2 catalysts as strategies to significantly improve CO oxidation activity at low temperature. When incorporated into CeO2 lattice, active metals significantly lower the oxygen vacancy formation energy (Evf) of the catalyst surface, resulting in high catalytic activities at low temperature. When the active metals are loaded on the CeO2 surface, many active sites could be acquired by increasing the dispersion, and the catalytic activity can be dramatically improved by newly introducing the interfacial sites between the metals and the CeO2 support. Doping the support could further improve this loaded system in terms of specific surface area, oxygen vacancy formation, and spillover effects. In this review, based on this knowledge, we propose a rational design approach to a robust low‐temperature CO oxidation catalysts. The desirable CO oxidation catalysts identified from the interplay between theoretical and experimental approaches would ultimately improve the quality of human life, and create potential economic benefits by alleviating air pollution. A dope review! Doping and loading systems are suggested as strategies for improving the CO oxidation activity of CeO2 catalysts. Transition metal (TM) and rare‐earth metal (RE) dopants dramatically improve the activity and stability of the CeO2 catalysts. Besides, the origin of the activity due to the metal‐support interaction is clearly presented. Based on experimental and theoretical approaches, metal supported on (RE, TM) co‐doped CeO2 is expected to benefit environment by suppressing the vehicular emission of CO at low temperature.