Architectural Designs and Synthetic Strategies of Advanced Nanocatalysts

Advanced nanocatalysts with high compositional and structural tailorability have emerged as a new class of heterogeneous catalysts exhibiting many new technical merits over their conventional counterparts. Generally, preparation of such catalysts involves the integration of catalyst components with compositional, size, and shape controls into a larger material system in order to bring along collective and synergetic effects of individual components. Herein, a brief review of architectural designs and synthetic strategies for making these nanocatalysts is presented. Due to length constraints, only four major types of them are highlighted together with some general rules of design and synthesis. Finally, a critical outline of future perspective in this field is proposed.