Mixed Oxides Confined and Tailored Cobalt Nanocatalyst for Direct Ethanol Synthesis from Syngas: A Catalyst Designing by Using Perovskite-Type Oxide as the Precursor

A novel scheme is designed to prepare superior catalysts with good activity, high selectivity, outstanding stability, excellent resistance to sintering and carbon deposition. In the scheme, the ions of lanthanum, strontium, cobalt, and gallium were confined into La1–xSrxCo0.65Ga0.35O3 with perovskite structure and uniformly dispersed at the atomic level; by reducing La1–xSrxCo0.65Ga0.35O3, a strong interaction between the active sites and promoters exists, and good catalytic performance for direct ethanol synthesis (DES) can be obtained. According to the design scheme, a series of La1–xSrxCo0.65Ga0.35O3 (x = 0–0.4) and La0.7Sr0.3CoO3 (LSC) catalysts were prepared by citric acid complexation method and characterized by XRD, H2-TPD, TPR, TEM, BET, XPS, and TG techniques. Thanks to the excellent catalyst design scheme, the catalyst reduced from La0.7Sr0.3Co0.65Ga0.35O3 showed good activity, high selectivity, and excellent stability for DES. Simultaneously, this catalyst design scheme can be extended to the design of other catalysts.