Scientists present {that a} single catalyst can take step one in changing CO2 to gasoline in two very other ways – Watts Up With That?
Her work aims to combine two approaches to driving the reaction – one with heat and one with electricity – with the aim of finding more efficient and sustainable ways to convert carbon dioxide into useful products.
Peer-reviewed publication
DOE / SLAC NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY
PICTURE: ITS PICTURE SHOWS ONE OF THE ACTIVE SIDE OF A NEW CATALYST, ACCELERATING THE FIRST STEP IN THE MANUFACTURING OF FUELS AND USEFUL CHEMICALS FROM CARBON DIOXIDE. THE ACTIVE SIDES ARE MADE OF NICKEL ATOMS (GREEN), BONDED TO NITROGEN ATOMS (BLUE) AND DISTRIBUTED VIA A CARBON MATERIAL (GRAY). THE RESEARCHERS AT SLAC AND STANFORD DISCOVERED THIS CATALYST, NIPACN, WORKS IN REACTIONS THAT ARE DRIVEN BY HEAT OR ELECTRICITY – AN IMPORTANT STEP IN UNDERSTANDING CATALYTIC REACTIONS IN THE DIFFERENT TWO REACTIONS. see more
CREDIT: GREG STEWART / SLAC NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY
Almost all chemical and fuel production is based on catalysts that accelerate chemical reactions without being consumed. Most of these reactions take place in huge reactor vessels and can require high temperatures and pressures.
Scientists have been working on alternative ways to power these reactions with electricity rather than heat. This could potentially enable inexpensive, efficient, distributed production powered by renewable electricity sources.
However, researchers who specialize in these two approaches – heat versus electricity – tend to work independently, developing different types of catalysts tailored to their specific reaction environments.
A new direction of research should change that. Scientists from Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory reported today that they have developed a new catalyst that works on either heat or electricity. Based on nickel atoms, the catalyst accelerates a reaction to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide – the first step in the production of fuels and useful chemicals from CO2.
The results represent an important step in unifying the understanding of catalytic reactions under these two very different conditions with different driving forces, said Thomas Jaramillo, professor at SLAC and Stanford and director of the SUNCAT Institute for Interface Science and Catalysis, where the research took place instead of.
“It’s a rarity in our field,” he says. “The fact that we were able to put it together in a frame to look at the same material makes this work special and opens up a whole new way of looking at catalysts in a much broader way.”
The results also explain how the new catalyst accelerates this key reaction when used in an electrochemical reactor, the research team said. Your report appeared this week in the print edition of Angewandte Chemie.
For a sustainable future in chemistry
Finding ways to convert CO2 into chemicals, fuels and other products, from methanol to plastics to synthetic natural gas, is a major focus of SUNCAT research. If done on a large scale with renewable energies, it could create market incentives for recycling the greenhouse gas. This requires a new generation of catalysts and processes to carry out these transformations on an industrial scale inexpensively and efficiently – and these discoveries require new ideas.
In search of new directions, SUNCAT formed a team of PhD students that included three research groups from the Chemical Engineering Department at Stanford: Sindhu Nathan, from Professor Stacey Bent’s group, whose research focuses on heat-driven catalytic reactions, and David Koshy, from Jaramillo and Professor Zhenan Bao jointly advise and focus on electrochemical reactions.
Nathan’s work aimed to understand heat-driven catalytic reactions at the elementary, atomic level.
“Heat-driven reactions are widely used in industry today,” she said. “And for some reactions, a heat driven process would be difficult to implement because very high temperatures and pressures can be required for the desired reaction to occur.”
Powering reactions with electricity could make some transformations more efficient, Koshy said, “because you don’t have to heat things up, and you can also make reactors and other components smaller, cheaper, and more modular – and that’s a great way to take advantage of them renewable raw materials. “
Scientists studying these two types of reactions work in parallel and rarely interact with each other, so they don’t have many opportunities to learn from each other that could help them develop more effective catalysts.
However, if the two camps could work on the same catalyst, it would create a basis for unifying their understanding of the reaction mechanisms in both environments, Jaramillo said. “We had theoretical reasons to believe that the same catalyst would work under both reaction conditions,” he said, “but this idea was not tested.”
A new way to discover catalysts
For their experiments, the team chose a catalyst recently synthesized by Koshy called NiPACN. The active parts of the catalyst – the places where it detects passing molecules, reacts them and releases the products – are made up of individual nickel atoms bound to nitrogen atoms and scattered throughout the carbon material. Koshy’s research had already shown that NiPACN can drive certain electrochemical reactions with high efficiency. Could it do the same under thermal conditions?
To answer this question, the team took the powdered catalyst to the SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL). They worked with Distinguished Staff Scientist Simon Bare to develop a tiny reactor in which the catalyst could accelerate a reaction between hydrogen and carbon dioxide at high temperatures and high pressure. The setup enabled them to direct X-rays into the reaction through a window and observe the reaction process.
In particular, they wanted to see whether the harsh conditions in the reactor change the catalyst, as it facilitates the reaction between hydrogen and CO2.
“People might say, how do you know the atomic structure hasn’t changed, which makes this a slightly different catalyst than the one we previously tested in electrochemical reactions?” Koshy said. “We had to show that the nickel reaction centers still look the same after the reaction is complete.”
This is exactly what they found out when they examined the catalyst in great detail before and after the reaction using X-rays and transmission electron microscopy.
In the future, the research team wrote, studies like these will be essential to unifying the study of catalytic phenomena across reaction environments, which will ultimately aid efforts to discover new catalysts for transforming the fuel and chemical industries.
Portions of this study were conducted at the Stanford Nano Shared Facilities, the Canadian Center for Electron Microscopy, and the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. CNMS and SSRL are user facilities of the DOE Office of Science. Substantial funding came from the DOE Office of Science, including support from the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, a DOE Energy Innovation Hub.
Quote: David M. Koshy et al., Angewandte Chemie International Edition, April 6, 2021 (10.1002 / anie.202101326)
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DIARY
applied Chemistry
DOI
10.1002 / anie.202101326
RESEARCH METHOD
Experimental study
RESEARCH SUBJECT
Inapplicable
ITEM HEADING
Bridge between thermal catalysis and electrocatalysis: catalyzing CO2 conversion with carbon-based materials
ITEM RELEASE DATE
April 6, 2021
COI STATEMENT
No conflict declared
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