CarbonChem · Metal graphdiyne towards electrochemical water splitting
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-01-26 → 2024-02-14
- EU contribution
- €214,159
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Metal graphdiyne towards electrochemical water splitting
‘Green Hydrogen (H2)’ is an ideal clean energy source, due to high calorific value, which is considered as alternative to instead of traditional fossil fuels. European commission has initiated the ‘Clean Hydrogen Alliance’ and launched a new ‘European Industrial Strategy’ for promoting the development of the hydrogen industry. To date, steam methane reforming is the main method for hydrogen production (over 94% in Europe), which is operated under harsh conditions and is energy intensive. Electrochemical water splitting is an ultimate strategy with environmentally-friend and low-consumption, which involves two half-reactions: hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Owing to the sluggish kinetics of HER and OER, electrocatalyst is intensely desired to reduce their overpotentials and facilitate practical applications. It is known that the current scope of electrocatalysts utilized for water splitting reactions is dominated by inorganic nanomaterials, their metal active sites only exist on the surface and/or edge of the nanostructures. The major unexposed metal atoms in the bulk phase are inert for electrocatalysis, which strictly limits the metal atom utilization. In particular, because of the fixed crystal structure, the current inorganic nanomaterials are difficult to continue as proper models to reveal mechanism of high-efficiency single-atom electrocatalysis, that encumbers the development of electrocatalytic technologies. In order to break this bottleneck, the proposed research project aims at re-defining the concept of electrocatalysts and will achieve a new-type scientific platform for single-atom electrocatalysis of water splitting.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are two key half-reactions in electrochemical water splitting, which is an eco-friendly technology to produce hydrogen. Both of the half-reactions are limited by high overpotentials and interaction between the reactions. Until now, electrochemical water splitting still relies on some inorganic noble-metal catalysts. Exploiting highly-efficient low-cost bifunctional electrocatalysts is a promising method to solve these issues. Thus, CarbonChem project aims at overcoming the limitation of traditional inorganic materials and re-defining the designing concept to construct organic framework electrocatalyst for HER and OER. Owing to the high designability and porous structure, organic frameworks are considered as a reasonable alternative to construct electrocatalysts; but the low conductivity strictly restricts their utilization. Incorporation sp-hybridization of graphdiyne (GDY) into organic frameworks can overcome the bottleneck, which provides the possibility for achieving organic electrocatalysts. As a result of single chemical composition, the active centres of GDY are consisted of unsaturated C and N sites, which are hard to provide high catalytic activities for HER and OER. Focusing on this issue, this project will give new insights on GDYs, providing a design concept for their chemical structure. Employing conjugated porphyrin with four coordinated N sites is a new strategy for introducing metal atoms into GDYs. Constructed metalloporphyrin-based graphdiyne (MPGDY) is fully consistent with the design principle of electrocatalyst: high conductivity, effective active sites and mesoporous structure. This research will develop an efficient bifunctional MPGDY electrocatalyst, for European hydrogen industry. The ER will achieve abundant research experience and scientific skills from the CarbonChem project and the capability to launch his own research group in future.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITETET I SOROST-NORGE · HortenCoordinatorNorway
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101024758
- https://www.usn.no/english/research/our-research-centres-and-groups/technology/materials-and-micro-integration/metal-graphdiyne-towards-electrochemical-water-splitting-carbonchem
Data: CORDIS, © European Union