Publication Date: June 6, 2026
Does Turnover Number Represent a Single Value or a Distribution?
Congratulations to DCB Graduate Student Miguel Orozco (Sepunaru Group) and collaborators from the Mefford Group on their new publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society!
Their work challenges one of the most fundamental assumptions in heterogeneous catalysis: that a catalyst can be described by a single turnover number. By combining single-particle electrochemistry, electron microscopy, and computational modeling, the team demonstrates that nominally identical platinum nanoparticles exhibit a broad distribution of catalytic activities and deactivation behaviors, revealing that catalyst longevity is inherently heterogeneous at the nanoscale. The findings suggest that understanding and quantifying catalyst heterogeneity should become a central part of catalyst durability evaluation, either before or in parallel with efforts to optimize catalysts or accelerate their discovery using AI and other data-driven approaches. By advocating a bottom-up understanding of individual catalytic sites and their distributions, this work highlights the importance of first understanding the catalysts we already have before designing the next generation of catalytic materials.