The research group of Zeng Jie, Professor of University of science and technology of China, has made progress in the preparation of carbon dioxide catalyst for high efficiency electroreduction

Recently, Zeng Jie, Professor of the school of chemistry and materials science of the University of science and technology of China and Hefei National Research Center for micro scale material science, used different nickel content doped tin disulfide nano chips as catalysts to achieve efficient electric reduction of carbon dioxide to formic acid and carbon monoxide The nickel doped tin disulfide Nanoflake catalyst shows high activity and stability in the reduction of carbon dioxide This achievement is entitled "nickel doping in atomically thin tin disulfide nanosheets enableshighly efficient CO 2 reduction" and published in the Journal of German Applied Chemistry (angelw Chem Int ed 2018, 57, 10954-10958) The co authors of this paper are Zhang an, a master's candidate, he Rong, a doctoral candidate and Li Huiping, a master's candidate In the electroreduction of carbon dioxide, the activation of carbon dioxide molecules has always been a research difficulty Because, in the standard case, the standard electrode potential required for the activation of CO2 molecule into CO2 anion in aqueous solution is relative standard hydrogen-1.9 V vsrhe Generally, the activation of CO2 involves the transfer of electrons from the catalyst to CO2, which is closely related to the electronic structure of the catalyst Therefore, the efficient activation of CO2 can be achieved by adjusting the electronic structure of the catalyst Based on this idea, the researchers obtained SnS2 Nanoflake catalysts with different nickel doping by adjusting the content of nickel The SnS2 nano sheet catalyst with appropriate nickel content can activate the CO2 molecule efficiently, thus enhancing the electrocatalytic reduction performance of CO2 In the electrocatalytic reduction of CO 2, the Faraday efficiency and current density of 5% Ni doped SNS 2 nanoflakes were 93% and 19.6 MA / cm 2 respectively at - 0.9 V vs rhe The mechanism study further shows that Ni doping will produce defects near the conduction band of SnS2, and its work function will also be reduced This effect will help to realize the efficient activation of CO2 and improve the performance of the electroreduction reaction of CO2 This work not only prepared high-efficiency Ni doped SnS2 nano sheet as the catalyst for carbon dioxide reduction, but also provided a method for the reasonable design of the electrocatalyst The research was supported by the key research projects of Frontier Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the national major scientific research plan, the National Natural Science Foundation and other projects.