Séminaire IPCM | Pr. Alexander Cowan "Electrocatalytic carbon dioxide reduction with molecular catalysis:..."

Electrocatalytic carbon dioxide reduction provides a way to generate useful carbon fuels and feedstocks from a waste stream. Historically there has been a strong focus on the use of metal electrodes for carbon dioxide reduction, often Au, Ag and Cu. An alternative approach is to use molecular electrocatalysts for carbon dioxide reduction. Potential advantages include the (relative) ease of synthetic modifications of the catalyst structure and the possibility of tuning activity.
This presentation will cover two aspects of the use of molecular catalysts for CO2 reduction. A challenge in electrocatalysis is to be able to selectively address the surface species which is essential if intermediates that may only present transiently, as a result of specific surface interactions, are to be detected. In part 1 of the talk we will show the use of in-situ and operando vibrational sum-frequency generation spectroscopy to monitor molecular electrocatalysts with a high temporal resolution. In this way we can track both catalyst and solvent species and show how surface interactions are critical in controlling catalytic activity.[1-3] In the 2nd part of the talk we will report how molecular catalysts behave within a zero-gap electrolyser, focusing on recent developments using reverse biased bipolar membrane structures to achieve high single pass conversion efficiencies at high current densities.[4-7]
References: [1] J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2017,  139, 13791, [2] Nature Catalysis, 1, 2018, 952, [3] J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2024, 146, 11, 7130–7134 [4] J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2022, 144(17), 7551, [5] J . Am. Chem. Soc., 2023, 145(28), 15078-15083, [6] Adv. Mat. Int., 2023, 10(15), 2300203, [7] Sustainable Energy & Fuels, 2023, 2023,7, 2301-2307