• Miola, Matteo

Abstract

The carbon dioxide utilization and conversion to valuable products is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. The aim of my PhD project is to develop novel heterogeneous catalysts for electrochemical carbon dioxide (eCO2R) reduction. The novel catalyst should be produced in an environmentally sustainable way and have high selectivity towards the electrochemical CO2 conversion to valuable products. <br/>To this end, we investigated two different strategies: (i) the use of earth-abundant low-cost precursors, and (ii) the reduction of scarce or rare element load by rational nano-particle/structure design.<br/>Major attention has been devoted towards the use green processes, simplification of the synthesis steps and the use of non-toxic, abundant elements, precursors and solvents to ensure the future applicability on a large-scale.<br/>Multiple physical and chemical characterization methods have been applied to correlate the electrocatalytic properties and material morphology to the synthesis procedures. Through the iterative material development towards efficient eCO2R, three classes of materials has been prepared.<br/>Mesoporous carbon was used as template to form gold nanoparticles. This allowed us to prepare nanoparticles of the rare metal, with high mass activity and selectivity towards carbon monoxide. <br/>The production of iron- and nitrogen-doped carbons via graphitization of earth-abundant highly-available nitrogen and iron precursors led to the development of a blood-derived iron protoporphyrin electrocatalyst for the selective production of carbon monoxide.<br/>Finally, bismuth-based metal-organic-frameworks have been used as precursors for the synthetises of highly efficient electrodes with high mass activity for formate production. This approach ultimately reduces the load of the earth-scarce bismuth precursor.<br/>

Topics

• nanoparticle
• impedance spectroscopy
• Carbon
• gold
• Nitrogen
• iron
• Bismuth