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.