Protection of high active sites on Cu2O nanocages: an efficient crystalline catalyst for ammonium perchlorate decomposition

For crystalline catalysts with special morphology, the corners and edges are usually of high activities due to the presence of unsaturated coordination sites. So it will be an ideal strategy to promote the catalytic properties by only keeping the corners and edges of such kind of catalysts. In this work, the Cu2O tetradecahedral nanocage with plenty of corners and edges was formed by selectively etching (111) and (100) facets on the basis of a simple top-down method, in which SDS was used as a protective agent to keep the active corners and edges while hydroxylamine hydrochloride was used as a reducing agent and an etchant. The decomposition of ammonium perchlorate (AP) was used as a probe reaction to test its catalytic performance. It was found that the low temperature decomposition (LTD) and high temperature decomposition (HTD) were reduced by 27.1 oC and 107 oC, respectively, and the heat release had increased by three times in comparison with pure AP. The Cu2O nanocage exhibits excellent activity and high catalytic performance in the reaction. This work provides us an effective AP thermal decomposition catalyst, and a simple strategy to fabricate hollow structure with low-energy facets etching and high active facets exposing.