2023-05-04
Lately, research article "Maximizing the Utilization of Single-Atom Sites on Carbon-Based catalysts for Efficient CO2 Electroreduction with Ultrahigh Turnover Frequency" accomplished by the research group of Professor. Wang Qiang from the College of Environmental Science and Engineering of BFU, was published in top journal in environmental area Applied Catalysis B: Environmental (IF=24.319).
Increasing the amount of accessible active sites to reactants is an effective way to enhance electrocatalytic activity. Although single-atom catalysts are claimed to be capable of achieving 100% atomic utilization, there may be abundant single-atom sites buried and inaccessible to reactants in practice. Herein, two Ni, N-doped carbon catalysts with Ni-Nx atomic sites are comparatively studied for CO2 electroreduction. In contrast to the Ni-Nx/Carbon nanosheets with Ni loading of 2.42 wt%, the Ni-Nx/Carbon black with lower Ni loading of 0.16 wt% excitingly exhibits higher activity for CO production. The atomically dispersed Ni-Nx sites over carbon black surface benefit the exposure and utilization of single-atom sites, leading to a significant increase of TOF from 2140 to 100,347 h−1 at − 0.8 V. Particularly, an extraordinarily high current density up to 300 mA cm−2 with CO selectivity of ∼100 % are achieved for Ni-Nx/CB in the flow cell. This work demonstrates the significance of increasing single-atom site utilization.
The first author of the paper is Liang Shuyu, doctoral candidate from the College of Environmental Science and Engineering, and the corresponding authors are Zhang Tianyu and Wang Qiang. Beijing Forestry University is the signatire unit of the first author. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52225003, 22208021), the Beijing Municipal Education Commission through the Innovative Transdisciplinary Program “Ecological Restoration Engineering”.
Paper link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0926337323004447
