Achievement of the intrinsic activity by in situ electrochemical reconstruction has been becoming a great challenge for designing a catalyst. Herein, an effective electrochemical strategy is proposed to reconstruct the surface of the CF–CuO/CeO2 precursor. Under the stimulation of oxidative/reductive potential, abundant active sites were successfully generated on the surface of CF–CuO/CeO2. Remarkably, the implantation of oxygen vacancy-rich CeO2 synergistically optimizes the chemical composition and electronic structure of CF–CuO/CeO2, greatly promoting the generation of active species. Systematic electrochemical experiments indicate that the superior catalytic performance of reconstructed CF–CuO/CeO2 could be attributed to CuOOH/CeO2 and Cu2O/Ce2O3 active species, respectively. The oxidative-/reductive-activated CF–CuO/CeO2 was further employed in a paired cell for the synergistic catalysis of hydroxymethylfurfural oxidation with 4-nitrophenol hydrogenation. As a result, nearly 100% Faraday efficiency for furandicarboxylic acid/4-aminophenol production was achieved in the paired system (−0.9 V vs Ag/AgCl, 1.5 h). Therefore, the electrochemical reconstruction via oxidative/reductive activation has been confirmed as a feasible approach to significantly excite the intrinsic activity of a catalyst.

The synchronous optimization of adsorption and activity dominates the practical performance in electrocatalysis, so Ag/Ni-MOF/Ni foam was synthesized for expediting 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) reduction under mild and green conditions. The synergistic...

Electrochemical oxidation of biomass-derived 5hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) is a promising approach to produce high-value chemicals such as 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA). However, the undesirable stability of catalysts commonly limits its potential application value. In this work, NiOOH derived from Ni(OH) 2 was determined as the main catalytic site for HMF oxidation, but the collapse of Ni(OH) 2 caused severe instability during the electrocatalytic process because of the crystal structure mismatch between NiOOH and Ni(OH) 2 . The implantation of Ce in Ni(OH) 2 (Ce-Ni(OH) 2 ) was successfully realized to address the stability issue of bare Ni(OH) 2 , since the larger ion radius of Ce could increase the Ni−O bond length and d-spacing. As a result, the activity of 14%Ce-Ni(OH) 2 has not obviously decayed after the 50 cyclic voltammetry (CV)-cycle test. HMF conversion is close to 100%, and the Faraday efficiency (FE) reaches 86.6% at the potential of 0.45 V vs Ag/AgCl. This study provides a new strategy to design stable catalysts for the conversion of biomass derivatives.

No abstract

No abstract