Metrohm's Young Chemist Award Winner 2014
2014 winner: Linghong Zhang
Abstract:
Molecular Interfaces to Diamond for Electrocatalytic Reduction of Carbon Dioxide
The increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past decades has caused increasing concerns in its impact on global warming and climate change. It has also triggered more and more interest in investigating the possibility of converting carbon dioxide back to more useful materials (e.g. carbon monoxide, formic acid, methane, methanol), which can be used as fuels — therefore positively impacting the global carbon balance. However, carbon dioxide conversion/reduction is challenging in that the activation pathways usually require high energy input, and the reduction products could be too diverse to be efficiently used.
Molecular catalysts such as metalloporphyrins represent an important class of catalysts for carbon dioxide reduction, since they will not only lower the activation pathways but also selectively reduce carbon dioxide to certain products. However, their poor solubility in reductively stable solvent hinders their application. In this work, we report first covalent attachment of a cobalt porphyrin carbon dioxide reduction catalyst onto conductive boron-doped diamond. Boron-doped conductive diamond is a promising platform for electrocatalysis because of its exceptionally large window of electrochemical stability, good electron transfer properties, strong covalent bonds to surface modifiers and low cost. Tethering cobalt porphyrin molecules to diamond surface can solve the insolubility problem and takes advantage of diamonds' excellent properties along with efficient conversion of electrical energy into chemical energy of electrochemical systems and the convenience and low catalyst loading of heterogeneous catalyst systems.
We observed the catalytic behaviors from carbon dioxide reduction through electrochemical analysis and detected carbon monoxide as the major reduction product for our system. This method is also applicable towards surface attachment of other molecular catalysts with well-demonstrated carbon dioxide reduction ability.
See more at: http://info.metrohmusa.com/youngchemi...