Advanced Carbon-Supported Catalysts for Sustainable Oxidation and Reduction Transformations

Carbon-supported catalysts have emerged as a versatile platform for addressing critical challenges in sustainable chemistry, owing to their high surface area, tunable porosity, electrical conductivity, chemical stability, and structural diversity. Recent advances in carbon materials—including porous carbons, graphene, carbon nanotubes, carbon nanofibers, carbon dots, biomass-derived carbons, MOF-derived carbons, and heteroatom-doped carbon frameworks—have enabled the precise stabilization of metal nanoparticles, single-atom catalysts, dual-atom catalysts, and metal-free active sites. These materials have demonstrated remarkable performance in a broad range of oxidation and reduction reactions (ORR), CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR), N2 reduction reaction (NRR) relevant to clean energy production, environmental remediation, and green chemical synthesis. Coupled with advances in nanoarchitectonics, defect engineering, operando characterization, and computational modeling, carbon-supported catalysts now offer unprecedented opportunities to elucidate reaction mechanisms and establish structure–activity relationships, paving the way toward highly efficient, selective, and durable catalytic systems.The transition toward carbon-neutral chemical manufacturing and sustainable energy technologies requires catalytic materials capable of driving oxidation and reduction reactions with high activity, selectivity, and long-term stability under mild operating conditions. Despite substantial progress, many catalytic processes—including CO2 reduction, water splitting, oxygen reduction/evolution, nitrogen reduction, selective oxidation, hydrogenation, oxidative desulfurization, biomass valorization, and pollutant degradation—continue to face limitations arising from insufficient active-site utilization, poor catalyst stability, sluggish reaction kinetics, and incomplete mechanistic understanding. This Research Topic aims to bring together the latest advances in the design, synthesis, characterization, and application of advanced carbon-supported catalysts for sustainable catalytic transformations. Particular emphasis will be placed on emerging catalyst architectures such as single-atom catalysts, dual-atom catalysts, heteronuclear bimetallic sites, defect-engineered carbon materials, and hierarchical porous nanostructures. Contributions integrating operando/in situ characterization, theoretical calculations, machine learning, and scalable catalyst or electrode fabrication are especially encouraged. By combining fundamental insights with practical applications, this Research Topic seeks to establish new catalyst design principles that accelerate the development of efficient, durable, and economically viable catalytic technologies for energy conversion, environmental remediation, and green chemical production.This Research Topic welcomes original research articles, reviews, mini-reviews, perspectives, and methods papers focusing on the synthesis, characterization, mechanistic understanding, and catalytic applications of advanced carbon-supported catalysts. Contributions addressing both fundamental science and industrially relevant catalytic processes are encouraged. Studies employing advanced experimental techniques, operando/in situ spectroscopy, synchrotron characterization, theoretical simulations, artificial intelligence, and scalable manufacturing approaches are particularly welcome.• Carbon-supported single-, dual-, and multi-atom catalysts• Heteroatom-doped and defect-engineered carbon materials• Graphene-, CNT-, fullerene-, MOF/COF-derived, and biomass-derived carbon catalysts• Hierarchical porous carbon architectures and nanoarchitectonics• Electrocatalysis, photocatalysis, photoelectrocatalysis, and thermocatalysis• CO₂ conversion to fuels and chemicals• Oxygen reduction/evolution and hydrogen evolution reactions• Nitrogen reduction and ammonia synthesis• Selective oxidation and hydrogenation reactions• Oxidative desulfurization and denitrogenation• Biomass conversion and waste-to-value catalysis• Advanced oxidation processes for water purification• Catalyst stability, deactivation, regeneration, and durability• Operando/in situ characterization and reaction mechanisms• Density functional theory (DFT), molecular simulations, and machine learning for catalyst design• Scalable catalyst synthesis, electrode fabrication, and industrial translation Topic editors: Biswa Nath Bhadra, Mohammad Rezaul Karim, Nazmul Abedin Khan Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85365/advanced-carbon-supported-catalysts-for-sustainable-oxidation-and-reduction-transformations