Electronic Structure-Selectivity Trends for Electrocatalytic Nitrate Reduction to Ammonium on 3d Transition Metals
AIChE Annual Meeting
2021
2021 Annual Meeting
Annual Student Conference
Undergraduate Student Poster Session: Catalysis and Reaction Engineering
Monday, November 8, 2021 - 10:00am to 12:30pm
Nitrate is a toxic anthropogenic groundwater contaminant, accumulating in drinking water and posing a human-health hazard. Nitrogen loading and accumulation of aqueous nitrate in groundwater is of a comparable scale and pervasiveness as global CO2 emissions. In parallel, production of ammonia (NH3) by the thermal Haber-Bosch process accounted for 1.8% of the global energy consumption and represented the most carbon-intensive commodity of 2020.[1] This project aims to understand how Faradaic efficiency (FE) and selectivity towards ammonium (NH4+) during the electrochemical nitrate reduction reaction (NO3RR) is dependent on bulk, resting material electronic structure. Here we present NO3RR activity and selectivity of several transition metal foils (e.g. Cu, Ni, Ni0.67Cu0.33, Fe, and Ti), relating this information to electronic structure (work function, ð, and d-band center, Ed, relative to Evac) and how it plays a critical role in proton affinity and NO3RR FE and selectivity to NH4+.