Herein, we designed an extremely facile method to prepare well-defined MnO2@CeO2-MnO2 ball-in-ball binary oxide hollow spheres by employing carbon spheres (CSs) as sacrificial templates. The synthesis process involves a novel self-assembled approach to prepare core-shell CSs@CeO2 precursor, which would directly react with KMnO4 aqueous solution to form yolk-shell CSs@MnO2/CeO2-MnO2 precursor in the following step. Well-dispersed Ce-Mn binary oxide with double-shelled hollow sphere structure could be achieved after annealing the precursor in air. The evolution process and formation mechanism of this novel structure were thoroughly studied in this paper. Especially the as-prepared double-shell MnO2/CeO2-MnO2 hollow spheres exhibited enhanced catalytic activity for CO oxidation compared with the pure MnO2 hollow spheres and pure CeO2 hollow spheres. We believe the high surface area, hierarchical porous structures, and strong synergistic interaction between CeO2 and MnO2 contribute to the excellent catalytic activity. Most importantly, this method could be extended to prepare other transition metal oxides. As an example, triple-shelled Co-Mn composite hollow spheres assembled by ultrathin nanoplates were successfully prepared.
Keywords: CeO2; MnO2; catalytic oxidation; double-shell; hollow spheres.