Single-atom catalysts get the most out of every metal atom, which is exactly why they are so attractive. The catch has been making the high-density versions. Most routes only work for one specific metal-and-support pairing and lean on high-temperature annealing, so the chemistry stayed narrow and hard to move beyond a single lab result.
- A single bottom-up polycondensation route builds both mono- and bimetallic catalysts from the same molecular building blocks, without a high-temperature annealing step.
- Metal loadings reach up to 27.5 wt% while the atoms stay individually dispersed and structurally stable.
- The same chemistry carries across a wide range of metals, turning one method into a full catalyst library instead of a one-off.
- The materials held their performance under real electrocatalytic and photocatalytic operating conditions.
- The full workflow was automated and scaled up on a Chemspeed platform, delivering the reproducibility needed for data-driven, self-optimizing materials discovery.
When one automated recipe can generate an entire library of stable single-atom catalysts, discovery stops being a bottleneck and starts running like a pipeline.
Authors and institutions: Jaques-Christopher Schmidt, Jan Romano-deGea, Dragos C. Stoian, Mounir Mensi, Miyeon Chang, Ariana Serban, Satyadeep Waiba, Xinbang Wu, Lindsey E. K. Frederiksen, Rosie J. Somerville, Roland C. Turnell-Ritson, Xunhui Wang, Laura Piveteau, Daniel Ortiz, Niccolò Martinolli, David Reyes, Jordi Espín, Timo M. O. Felder, Stefano Di Leone, Pascal Miéville, Shoubhik Das and Paul J. Dyson, working across École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland; the University of Bayreuth, Germany; and the Swiss-Norwegian Beamlines (SNBL) at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), Grenoble, France.
Journal and original link: Advanced Materials (Wiley)
https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adma.202507627
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