High entropy oxides as a rising star in pollutant disposal and resource recycling: Emerging advancements and future challenges

Efficient pollutant disposal and rational resource recycling are pivotal for alleviating ecological dysfunction and balancing global energy consumption. The essential demand for functional materials has triggered tremendous efforts. High-entropy oxides (HEOs), incorporating at least five metal cations into a single-phase crystal structure, exhibit significant configurational disorder, providing an almost unlimited scope for tailoring the structure and property. These instinct characteristics endow HEOs with superior activity, adaptability, and stability than traditional metallic materials, presenting considerable commercial value. This review summarizes the design and progress of HEOs for catalysis, covering development history, synthetic strategies, structural features, and intrinsic properties, emphasizing the correlation between compositional and structural engineering and catalytic performance optimization. Mechanisms related to catalytic degradation of various pollutants and multifaceted resource utilization are analyzed, proposing challenges for future HEOs development. Tuning the composition and configuration of HEOs provides new ideas for obtaining high-performing catalysts and addressing challenges inherent in traditional systems.

高效污染物处置与合理化资源循环，对于缓解生态功能失调、平衡全球能源消耗至关重要。功能材料的迫切需求催生了大量相关研究投入。高熵氧化物（High-entropy oxides，HEOs）将至少五种金属阳离子整合至单相晶体结构中，展现出显著的构型无序性，为调控其结构与性能提供了近乎无限的空间。这些固有特性使得高熵氧化物相较于传统金属材料具备更优异的活性、适应性与稳定性，拥有可观的商业应用价值。本综述总结了用于催化领域的高熵氧化物的设计思路与研究进展，涵盖其发展历程、合成策略、结构特征与本征属性，并重点阐述了组分与结构调控同催化性能优化之间的内在关联。本文分析了高熵氧化物催化降解各类污染物的相关机制以及多维度资源利用路径，并提出了其未来发展面临的挑战。对高熵氧化物的组分与构型进行调控，为开发高性能催化剂以及解决传统催化体系固有的技术难题提供了全新思路。