With the energy crisis and environmental pollution becoming more and more serious, it is urgent to develop renewable and clean energy. Hydrogen production from electrolyzed water is of great significance to solve the energy crisis and environmental problems in the future. Recently, layered double hydroxides (LDHs) materials have been widely studied in the electrocatalysis field, due to their unique layered structure, tunable metal species and highly dispersed active sites. Moreover, the LDHs supporting noble metal catalysts obtained through the topotactic transformation of LDHs precursors significantly reduce the energy barrier of electrolyzing water, showing remarkable catalytic activity, good conductivity and excellent durability. In this review, we give an overview of recent advances on LDHs supporting noble metal catalysts, from a brief introduction, to their preparation and modification methods, to an overview of their application in the electrocatalysis field, as well as the challenges and outlooks in this promising field on the basis of current development.

A high-efficient and low-cost catalyst on hydrogen isotope separation between hydrogen and water is an essential factor in industrial application for heavy water production and water detritiation. In past studies, Pt-based catalysts were developed but not practical for commercial use due to their high cost for vapor phase catalytic exchange (VPCE), while for impregnated nickel catalysts with a lower cost the problems of agglomeration and low Ni utilization existed. Therefore, to solve these problems, in-situ grown Ni-based catalysts (NiAl-LDO) derived from a layered double hydroxide (LDH) precursor were fabricated and first applied in VPCE in this work. Compared with traditional impregnated Ni-based catalysts, NiAl-LDO catalysts own a unique layered structure, homogeneous dispersed metallic phase, higher specific surface area as well as stronger metal-support interactions to prevent active metal from agglomerating. These advantages are beneficial for exposing more active sites to improve dynamic contacts between H₂ and HDO in a catalyst surface and can bring excellent catalytic activity under a reaction temperature of lower than 400 °C. Additionally, we found that the dissociative chemisorption of HDO and H₂ occurs not only in Ni (111) but also in NiO species where chemisorbed H(ads), D(ads), OH(ads) and OD(ads) are formed. The results highlight that both of the Ni²⁺ species and Ni⁰ species possess catalytic activities for VPCE process.

Hydrogen-induced disproportionation (HID) during the cycles of absorption and desorption leads to a serious decline in the storage capacity of the ZrCo alloy, which has been recognized as the biggest obstacle to its application. Therefore, the prerequisite of a ZrCo application is to solve its anti-disproportionation problem in the field of rapid hydrogen isotope storage. Beyond surface modification and nanoball milling, this work systematically reviews the method of element substitution, which can obviously improve the anti-disproportionation. From a micro angle, as hydrogen atoms that occupy the 8e site in the ZrCoH₃ lattice are instable and are considered to be the driving force of disproportionation, researchers believe that element substitution by changing the occupation of hydrogen atoms at the 8e site can improve the anti-disproportionation of the alloy. At present, Ti/Nb substitutions for the Zr terminal among substitute elements have an excellent anti-disproportionation performance. In this work, up-to-date research studies on anti-disproportionation and its disproportionation mechanism of the ZrCo alloy are introduced by combining experiments and simulations. Moreover, the optimization of the alloy based on the occupation mechanism of 8e sites is expected to improve the anti-disproportionation of the ZrCo alloy.

Optimal synthesis of distillation sequence is a complex problem in chemical processes engineering, which involves process structure optimization and operation parameters optimization. The study of the synthesis of distillation sequence is a crucial step toward improving the efficiency of chemical processes and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This work introduced the concept of binary tree to encode the distillation sequence. The performance of the six evolutionary algorithms was evaluated by solving a 14-component distillation sequence synthesis problem. The best algorithm was used to optimize the operation parameters of a triple-column distillation process. The total annual cost and CO₂ emissions were considered as the metrics to evaluate the performance of triple-column distillation processes. As a result, NSGA-II-DE was found to be the best one of the six tested evolutionary algorithms. Then, NSGA-II-DE was applied to the distillation sequence optimization to find the best operating parameters, which led to a significant reduction in CO₂ emission and total annual costs.