Intelligent catalysis: on-demand dynamic self-optimization via responsive feedback

Abstract

Catalysis has become a critical pillar for realizing comprehensive and sustainable social development. However, due to the complex and ever-changing external environmental stimuli along with the continuously evolving internal structures, the current catalytic approach consistently confronts serious issues such as poisoning, active-site leaching, disorganization, pathway deviation and local failure, leading to reduced activity, selectivity and stability. Especially, conventional catalytic systems, constrained by their inherent structural rigidity and static operational window, struggle to sustain high efficiency and long-term durability under the extremely varying reaction conditions and current demands. Therefore, the precise design of intelligent catalytic systems and catalysts is inevitable for current catalysis. Intelligent catalysts possess dynamic self-optimized performance by integrating autonomous perception and rapid feedback responses within the catalyst structure and catalytic system, enabling on-demand, application-specific functionality across diverse operational scenarios. Specifically, intelligent catalysis can actively sense continuous changes in physicochemical environments, reaction conditions and practical requirements in real time, thereby performing in situ responsive, built-in catalytic-related feedback processes, including adaptive dynamic reconfiguration, signal transmission, self-regeneration and reaction pathway modulation, resulting in autonomously enhanced and diversified structure-function properties. Thus, this review systematically establishes the concept of intelligent catalysis, proposes the current intelligent catalysis classification of various self-optimized intelligent effects and outlines future truly intelligent systems with multimodal synergy. The intelligent catalytic mechanisms, design strategies and applications of intelligent catalysts, as well as challenges and countermeasures, are highlighted. We envision that this review can guide the design of next-generation catalysts and facilitate broader intelligent multi-scenario applications.