DimerCat · Isolated dimers for catalyzing CO2 electroreduction to higher carbon products
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-10-19 → 2022-10-18
- EU contribution
- €212,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
DimerCat: Isolated dimers for catalyzing CO2 electroreduction to higher carbon products
With increasing temperature, melting glaciers and drastic climate change, the need to move towards a net-zero world has accelerated. EU and most of the countries are trying to approach towards net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the use of renewable energy. This project aims towards converting CO2 to useful chemicals such as ethanol, ethylene etc. which forms the basic building block of many industrial chemicals. This method has an advantage over the conventional method in that it may result in significantly higher energy efficiency due to its low operational temperature compared to the thermocatalytic CO2 reduction. Decline in the cost of renewable electricity further adds to its advantage. The overall objective of the project is to synthesize metal-doped carbon catalysts, especially dual-atom catalysts (DACs) as they were predicted to form multi-carbon products (ethanol, ethylene) of high value during electrochemical CO2 reduction. i) Synthesis and stabilization of DimerCat materials, ii) Identification of the mechanism of ECO2RR and tuning the catalyst design to enhance the selectivity towards C2 products, iii) Investigation of the behavior of the catalysts at high current densities We could synthesize metal-doped carbon catalysts having dimeric metal sites. However, the number of dual-atomic sites were much lesser compared to the single-atomic sites and hence CO2 could be electrochemically reduced to carbon monoxide instead of the higher carbon products. It was really exciting to see that a very small percentage of metal doping on carbon could result in such a high activity, on-par with the state-of-the-art Au catalyst. Further we compared our synthesized catalyst with all the best reported catalysts and observed a general trend and limitations for all the catalysts, which is ascribed to the scaling-relationship between the intermediates.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
For the first time in human’s history, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has reached the highest level of 415.26 ppm on May 11, 2019. This results in severe climatic change throughout the world. Electrochemical CO2 reduction can convert this harmful CO2 to value-added carbon-based chemicals and is a carbon-neutral method of storing renewable electricity in the form of chemicals.This proposal aims to investigate carbon catalysts doped with metal-dimers as catalysts for CO2 reduction to higher-carbon (C2) products. Carbon-based catalysts are selected because of their high selectivity towards CO formation and the doped metal dimers are expected to favor the CO-CO coupling leading to the formation of C2 products. This would emulate the functionality of the nitrogenase enzyme, where V-V dimers are able to catalyze the formation of ethylene and other C2 products. The world-leading expertise of Prof. Magda Titirici (host) and Dr. Ifan Stephens; and the vibrant scientific community and state-of-the-art equipment at Imperial College, provide the perfect environment to successfully host my project despite its challenging nature. The deep expertise I have acquired during my Ph.D., in nanosynthesis and in-situ X-ray absorption spectroscopy of electrocatalysts would strongly complement my hosts’ expertise in carbon synthesis and operando testing. The bottleneck in the catalytic cycle will be identified and addressed. This new fundamental understanding will not only empower the scientific community but also enable the development of efficient electrocatalyst for higher-carbon product formation during CO2 reduction. Secondment will be carried out at Johnson Matthey that would allow us to scale-up the technology, developed at Imperial. Thus, the proposed project will try to solve the three major challenges of catalyst design, selectivity, and scalability and would equip me with scientific, technical and managerial skills to become a leading independent researcher.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE · LondonCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union