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Research Article

Enhancing electrocatalytic N2-to-NH3 fixation by suppressing hydrogen evolution with alkylthiols modified Fe3P nanoarrays

Tong Xu1,2,§Jie Liang1,§Yuanyuan Wang3Shaoxiong Li1Zhaobai Du1Tingshuai Li1Qian Liu4Yonglan Luo4Fang Zhang5Xifeng Shi6Bo Tang6Qingquan Kong4Abdullah M. Asiri7Chun Yang2( )Dongwei Ma3( )Xuping Sun1( )
Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences University of Electronic Science and Technology of ChinaChengdu 610054 China
College of Chemistry and Materials Science Sichuan Normal UniversityChengdu 610068 China
Key Laboratory for Special Functional Materials of Ministry of Education, and School of Materials Science and Engineering Henan UniversityKaifeng 475004 China
Institute for Advanced Study Chengdu UniversityChengdu 610106 China
National Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology No. 28 East Jiang Chuan RoadShanghai 200241 China
College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Shandong Normal UniversityJinan 250014 China
Chemistry Department, Faculty of Science & Center of Excellence for Advanced Materials Research King Abdulaziz University, P.O. Box 80203Jeddah 21589 Saudi Arabia

§ Tong Xu and Jie Liang contributed equally to this work.

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Abstract

Electrocatalytic N2 reduction provides an attractive alternative to Haber-Bosch process for artificial NH3 synthesis. The difficulty of suppressing competing proton reduction, however, largely impedes its practical use. Herein, we design a hydrophobic octadecanethiol- modified Fe3P nanoarrays supported on carbon paper (C18@Fe3P/CP) to effectively repel water, concentrate N2, and enhance N2-to-NH3 conversion. Such catalyst achieves an NH3 yield of 1.80 × 10–10 mol·s–1·cm–2 and a high Faradaic efficiency of 11.22% in 0.1 M Na2SO4, outperforming the non-modified Fe3P/CP (2.16 × 10-11 mol·s–1·cm–2, 0.9%) counterpart. Significantly, C18@Fe3P/CP renders steady N2-fixing activity/selectivity in cycling test and exhibits durability for at least 25 h. First-principles calculations suggest that the surface electronic structure and chemical activity of Fe3P can be well tuned by the thiol modification, which facilitates N2 electroreduction activity and catalytic formation of NH3.

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Nano Research
Pages 1039-1046
Cite this article:
Xu T, Liang J, Wang Y, et al. Enhancing electrocatalytic N2-to-NH3 fixation by suppressing hydrogen evolution with alkylthiols modified Fe3P nanoarrays. Nano Research, 2022, 15(2): 1039-1046. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-021-3592-8
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Received: 25 March 2021
Revised: 29 April 2021
Accepted: 12 May 2021
Published: 01 July 2021
© Tsinghua University Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2021
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