Promoting heterogeneous catalysis beyond catalyst design

Despite the indisputable success of conventional approaches to manipulate the performance of heterogeneous catalysts by tuning the composition and structure of active sites, future research on catalysis engineering will likely go beyond the catalyst itself. Recently, several auxiliary promotion methods, either promoting the activity of reagents or enabling optimized adsorbate–catalyst interactions, have been proven as viable strategies to enhance catalytic reactions. Those auxiliary promotion methods range from electric/magnetic fields and electric potentials to mechanic stress, significantly altering the properties of reagent molecules and/or the surface characteristics of nanostructured catalysts. Apart from static enhancement effects, they in principle also allow for spatially and temporally variable modifications of catalyst surfaces. While some of those methods have been demonstrated, some are only theoretically predicted, opening exciting avenues for future experimental advances. Besides fundamental descriptions and comparisons of each activation method, in this perspective we plan to provide examples for the applications of those techniques for a variety of catalytic reactions as diverse as N(2) and CO(2) hydrogenation as well as electrochemical water splitting. Finally, we provide a unifying view and guidelines for future research into the use of promotion methods, generating deeper understanding of the complex dynamics on the nanoparticle surface under auxiliary promotion and the expansion of auxiliary techniques to different sustainability-related reactions.