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Recently, the Key Laboratory of Low Carbon Conversion Science and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Shanghai Higher Research Institute-Shanghai University of Science and Technology Joint Laboratory of Low Carbon Energy have made important progress in the electrocatalytic reduction and conversion of carbon dioxide to formic acid and ethanol. The relevant results were published internationally. The journal "German Applied Chemistry" (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2017, doi: 10.1002/anie.201707098; Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2017, doi: 10.1002/ange.201706777).
Modern society consumes a large amount of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, causing a dramatic increase in the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, causing increasingly serious environmental problems such as global warming. Through electrocatalytic carbon dioxide conversion, clean wind energy such as renewable wind power, solar power generation or surplus nuclear power is used as energy source to convert carbon dioxide directly into carbon monoxide, formic acid, methanol, hydrocarbons and other fuels and chemicals under normal temperature and pressure conditions. At the same time, it has realized the utilization of carbon dioxide and the efficient storage of clean electric energy, showing promising application prospects. How to efficiently obtain high value-added chemicals is a very challenging hot topic in the research of electrocatalytic conversion of carbon dioxide.
After nearly two years of constant exploration, the working team of Chen Wei has screened and tried a large number of metal and alloy catalysts. Finally, it was found that the Pd-Sn alloy catalyst composed of metallic palladium (Pd) and tin (Sn) has very excellent performance. Simply applying a very low voltage (-0.43 V vs. RHE), the catalyst can use 99% of the input electrical energy (current efficiency) to drive carbon dioxide conversion to formic acid. Formic acid is one of the basic organic chemical raw materials and is widely used in industries such as pesticides, leather, dyes, medicine and rubber. This study uses carbon dioxide as a raw material to synthesize formic acid efficiently using renewable electric energy, which shows a good application prospect.
In addition, the conversion of carbon dioxide into electrocatalytic products to produce products containing two or more carbon atoms, such as ethylene and ethanol, is very difficult, and it is also a target that researchers in the industry have focused on. Based on previous research on nano-carbon materials, the research team developed nitrogen-doped mesoporous carbon (N-carbon) materials for electrocatalytic carbon dioxide conversion. By regulating the pore structure and surface active site configuration of N-carbon, the direct conversion of carbon dioxide to ethanol was successfully achieved. Ethanol is one of the most widely used basic chemicals used in the synthesis of acetic acid, beverages, flavors, dyes, and fuels. At present, the optimized N-carbon catalyst has a current efficiency of 77% for electrocatalytic conversion of carbon dioxide to ethanol at -0.56 V (vs. RHE) voltage. This research provides new ideas for the design and creation of electrocatalytic systems with high activity and selectivity for the production of multi-carbon products. It has been highly evaluated by reviewers and has been edited as a “very important paper†(VIP).
The above research work has been funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences “Hundred Talents Programâ€, the National Key Research and Development Program, the Shanghai Interdisciplinary Youth Innovation Fund/Science and Technology Innovation Fund of Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, and the Shanghai High-Tech Research Institute-Shanghai Science and Technology University Joint Research Laboratory of Low-Carbon Energy. .
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