Recently, a research team led by Prof. Zhong-Shuai Wu from the State Key Laboratory of Catalysis(SKLC) reported recent advances and design principle of electrocatalysts for electrooxidation of organics, which has been published as an invited review in the journal Chem.
Energy shortage and environmental pollution are the main problems in the world. It is urgent to produce high value-added chemicals in a more low-carbon and environmentally friendly way. Electricity can be coupled with sustainable energy sources such as wind, solar and tidal. The electrooxidation of organic can produce high value-added chemicals without toxic oxidant and carbon emission. Meanwhile, organic electrooxidation reactions can be coupled with electro-reduction reactions, such as HER, CO2RR and NRR, producing high value-added chemicals at both anode and cathode simultaneously with low energy consumption. However, multi-electron organic oxidation reactions usually have a large reaction energy barrier, which requires the development of highly efficient and long-life electrocatalyst. This review discusses the design principle of electrocatalysts, and recent advances for organic electrooxidation reaction as well as their coupling systems.
In this review, Wu and co-workers summarize the design principle of electrocatalyst for organics electrooxidation. First, the intrinsic catalytic activity of the active site should be improved. For example, adjusting the d-band center and electronic structure of catalyst active sites by heterojunction structure construction, electronic transfer between active site and substrate, heteroatomic doping, creating vacancy and alloying, then the adsorption/desorption energy between electrocatalyst and reactants, intermediates, products will be optimized, enhancing the thermodynamic process of the reaction. Second, the number of active sites is also an important factor affecting catalytic performance, especially for the complex multi-electron organics electrooxidation process. Therefore, 3D structure can effectively expose more active sites. Meanwhile, the synergistic catalysis of multiple active sites can accelerate the kinetics of the reaction. Third, the catalytic activity of electrocatalysts can be also enhanced by exploring the evolution of electrocatalysts in the reaction process through advanced in situ characterization to determine the active intermediates, then reducing the formation energy of the active phase.
This review was published on Chem with the title "Design Principle of Electrocatalysts for Electrooxidation of Organics". The first author of this work is Xianhong Wu in the 508 group of DICP. This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy of CAS, and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, etc. (Text by WU Xianhong and HOU Xiaocheng).
