Novel Design Strategy of High Activity Electrocatalysts toward Nitrogen Reduction Reaction via Boron–Transition-Metal Hybrid Double-Atom Catalysts

Release Time:2025-04-30  Hits:

• Date:2025-04-30
• Title of Paper:Novel Design Strategy of High Activity Electrocatalysts toward Nitrogen Reduction Reaction via Boron–Transition-Metal Hybrid Double-Atom Catalysts
• Journal:ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces
• Summary:Electrocatalytic nitrogen reduction reaction (NRR) is a promising method for sustainable production of NH 3 , which provides an alternative to the traditional Haber−Bosch process. However, the poor Faraday efficiency caused by NN triple bond activation and competitive hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) have seriously hindered the application of NRR. In this work, a novel strategy to promote NRR through boron−transition-metal (TM) hybrid double-atom catalysts (HDACs) has been proposed. The excellent catalytic activity of HDACs
  is attributed to a significant difference of valence electron distribution between boron and TMs, which could better activate NN bonds and
  promote the conversion of NH 2 to NH 3 compared with boron or metal single-atom catalysts and traditional double-atom catalysts (DACs).
  Hence, by means of DFT computations, the stability, activity, and selectivity of 29 HDACs are systematically investigated to evaluate their
  catalytic performance. B−Ti@g-CN and B−Ta@g-CN are screened as excellent nitrogen-fixing catalysts with particularly low limiting potentials of 0.13 and 0.11 V for NRR and rather high potentials of 0.54 and 0.82 V for HER, respectively. This work provides a new idea for the rational design of efficient nitrogen-fixing catalysts and could also be widely used in other catalytic reactions.
• Co-author:Yibo Wu, Cheng He,* and Wenxue Zhang
• Volume:2021, 13, 47520−47529
• Page Number:2021, 13, 47520−47529
• Translation or Not:No
• Date of Publication:2021-10-28