A recent advancement in the utilization of ethylene through electrocatalytic conversion has been made by the team led by Academician Bao Xinhe, Researcher Wang Guoxiong, and Researcher Gao Dunfeng from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. They proposed a reverse single-atom doping strategy to achieve high activity and stability in the electrocatalytic epoxidation of ethylene, and their findings have been published in "Angewandte Chemie International Edition."
Ethylene oxide is a widely used important chemical product in various industries. Currently, it is mainly produced industrially by the reaction of ethylene and oxygen at high temperatures and pressures. However, this process is prone to over-oxidation and emits a large amount of carbon dioxide due to the high temperature and pressure conditions. Electrocatalytic epoxidation of ethylene mediated by halogens, using water as an oxygen source, can effectively suppress the over-oxidation of ethylene and provide a low-carbon pathway for ethylene oxide production under mild conditions. Nevertheless, the halogen-mediated reaction environment is highly acidic, corrosive, and oxidative, posing extremely stringent requirements on catalytic materials.
In their work, the team developed a manganese barium oxide KIr4O8 nanowire catalyst doped with single-atom Ru. When used in the chlorinated ethylene epoxidation reaction under optimized conditions, the maximum faradaic efficiency of ethylene oxide reached 0.7 A/cm2, with a maximum ethylene oxide yield of 92%. Furthermore, the catalytic stability of this doped KIr4O8 catalyst was superior to that of the undoped counterpart.
This work provides a new perspective on utilizing single-atom modulation of neighboring metal sites to enhance reactivity and expands the reaction pathways for electrocatalytic conversion of carbon-based resources.
Link to the related paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202402950
