Temporospatial confinement engineering in catalysis: Rational design for advanced environmental remediation

Nowadays, purification technologies face a series of challenges in eliminating emerging contaminants (ECs) from the environment under complex conditions. Heterogeneous catalysis has been developed for efficient abatement of pollutants. Combining nanoconfinement effects, which can control reactions within the nanoscale, confined catalysis overcomes limitations of traditional methods, such as low atomic utilization, poor selectivity, and catalyst deactivation. This review summarizes recent achievements and future directions of nanomaterials for environmental applications. In this review, confinement effects are elucidated, including spatial, electronic, interfacial, dynamic, and spatiotemporal confinement, which make contributions in mass transfer, reaction pathways, and practical application. Synthesis technologies are overviewed from nanoreactors (yolk-shell, hollow, self-assembled), catalytic membranes (layered, spatiotemporal, sub-nanochannel), to macroscopic materials (aerogels, crosslinked beads, 3D monoliths), showing the nanoscale modification to large-scale fabrication. Recent research with superior performance is discussed in this work, including water treatment (micropollutants degradation and uranium extraction), air pollution control (CO/NO_x removal, CO₂ reduction, and VOC oxidation), and in-situ soil remediation (phosphate and arsenic removal). The characterization and theoretical simulations are listed to reveal the structure-activity relationships in heterogeneous catalysis. In addition, challenges and prospects are presented for future research, which should focus on the design of intelligent and multifunctional catalytic systems, laying the foundation for laboratory innovation to practical application in sustainable environmental remediation.