Ammonia is a vital base molecule for modern agriculture and industry. As the commercially-mature approach for NH3 production, the traditional Haber–Bosch process has achieved great success; however, it also suffers...
We have developed a sustainable method to produce NH3 directly from air using a plasma tandem-electrocatalysis
system
that operates via the N2–NO
x
–NH3 pathway. To efficiently reduce NO2
– to NH3, we propose a novel
electrocatalyst consisting of defective N-doped molybdenum sulfide
nanosheets on vertical graphene arrays (N-MoS2/VGs). We
used a plasma engraving process to form the metallic 1T phase, N doping,
and S vacancies in the electrocatalyst simultaneously. Our system
exhibited a remarkable NH3 production rate of 7.3 mg h–1 cm–2 at −0.53 V vs RHE,
which is almost 100 times higher than the state-of-the-art electrochemical
nitrogen reduction reaction and more than double that of other hybrid
systems. Moreover, a low energy consumption of only 2.4 MJ molNH3
–1 was achieved in this study.
Density functional theory calculations revealed that S vacancies and
doped N atoms play a dominant role in the selective reduction of NO2
– to NH3. This study opens up
new avenues for efficient NH3 production using cascade
systems.
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