How to recycle and convert carbon dioxide into organic fuel is a worldwide problem that scientists have been exploring. Recently, the Shanghai Institute of Advanced Chinese Academy of Sciences-Shanghai University of Science and Technology Low Carbon Energy Joint Laboratory has made important progress in the research of carbon dioxide electrocatalytic conversion. With clean renewable energy as energy source, carbon dioxide is converted into formic acid and ethanol in one step under mild reaction conditions, and the current efficiencies are as high as 99% and 77%, respectively. Relevant results were published in the internationally renowned journal “German Applied Chemistry”.
Formic acid is one of the basic organic chemical raw materials and is widely used in industries such as pesticides, leather, dyes, medicine and rubber. According to researcher Chen Wei of the Shanghai Institute of Advanced Chinese Academy of Sciences, the selection of catalysts is the key to the efficient conversion of carbon dioxide into formic acid by electrocatalysis. After nearly two years of continuous exploration, Chen has tried a large number of metal and alloy catalysts for the team’s screening. Finally, it was found that the Pd-Sn alloy catalyst composed of metal palladium and tin has excellent performance. Only a very low voltage is applied, and under normal temperature and normal pressure conditions, the catalyst can convert carbon dioxide to formic acid with a current efficiency of up to 99%, showing good application prospects. Chen Wei said that a big problem in the generation of new energy sources such as wind and solar energy is instability, randomness and seasonality, which makes the utilization efficiency greatly reduced. The research uses renewable energy such as renewable wind energy, solar energy or surplus nuclear power to efficiently recover carbon dioxide, and convert unstable new energy into stable chemical energy to achieve efficient storage of clean energy.
In addition, in addition to formic acid, the research team also produced one of the most widely used chemicals, ethanol, by electrocatalysis. Based on the previous research on nano-carbon materials, the research team optimized and developed a new type of non-metallic catalyst. This catalyst is made of a nitrogen-doped mesoporous carbon material and is much less expensive than a metal catalyst. The current efficiency of electrocatalytic ethanol reaches 77%, which is much higher than the international average of about 30%.
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