Boosting formaldehyde oxidation at low temperature with low-loading Ag catalysts via surface silanol engineering of MCM-41.

A novel acid pretreatment strategy modulates the distribution of silanol groups on MCM-41 by increasing isolated silanol groups while reducing H-bonded ones, which enables the formation of highly dispersed Ag nanoparticles. The resulting Ag catalyst dramatically enhances the catalytic performance, achieving complete formaldehyde conversion at 75 °C, with an approximately 50-fold enhancement compared to untreated samples (4.45 nm, 100%, vs. 15.4 nm, 2%).