CAS: Electrosynthesis via Electrochemical Hydrogen Permeation

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With the support of the Chemical Catalysis program in the Division of Chemistry, Yogesh Surendranath of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is studying how to use renewable electricity to drive the production of value-added fuels and chemicals. Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are poised to play an increasing role in meeting future demand for fuels and chemicals in a sustainable manner. Currently, technologies for converting electrical energy into fuels and chemicals are inefficient and often require complicated separation and processing steps. This project aims to develop new integrated strategies for driving chemical transformations with renewable electricity by intimately coupling catalysis and separations. The work will allow graduate and undergraduate students to learn the modern techniques of renewable energy science and collaborate to discover new catalysts and materials. The research work will also be integrated with a broad-based educational outreach effort that will employ a rhetoric-based framework to advance interactive learning, professional communication, and critical discourse in science.With the support of the Chemical Catalysis program in the Division of Chemistry, Yogesh Surendranath of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is studying how to use renewable electricity to drive the synthesis of value-added fuels and chemicals. Electrosynthetic reduction reactions can be bifurcated into electrochemical proton-coupled electron transfer steps to generate reactive surface H-atoms that then hydrogenate substrates via coupled chemical reactions. In conventional electrocatalysts, the chemical and electrochemical steps are co-localized to the same interface preventing independent control of each. This proposal advances a new paradigm for electrocatalysis in which the reaction environment of bond activation can be completely decoupled from that of electrochemical charge separation. Independent optimization of each will expose fundamentally new reactivity in electrocatalysis that could form the bedrock of new electrosynthetic reactions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.