Self-supported cuprous oxide/graphdiyne nanosheets array for efficient ammonia synthesis

Abstract

Electrocatalytic reduction of nitrates plays a crucial role in ammonia (NH₃) production. In this study, a novel cuprous oxide/graphdiyne (Cu₂O/GDY) electrocatalyst was synthesized by growing Cu₂O/GDY on a Cu substrate with a porous architecture capable of increasing the number of active sites and enhancing mass transfer ability. The sp-C-Cu bonds between Cu₂O and GDY facilitate rapid charge transfer and promote direct electron transport from active sites to reaction intermediates. Consequently, the electrocatalyst exhibits high NH₃ production performance with a yield rate (Y_NH3) of 652.82 µmol h⁻¹ cm⁻² and Faradaic efficiency of 82.98% at −1.8 V (vs. SCE) under ambient conditions in an aqueous solution. This work introduces a novel and efficient approach for the in situ fabrication of self-supported heterostructures, thereby enabling high-performance ammonia production under ambient conditions.

Keywords

Carbon materials / Graphdiyne / Heterostructure / Ammonia production / Nitrate reduction reaction

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jiayu Yan: Writing - original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis. Fanle Bu: Methodology, Formal analysis. Lu Qi: Formal analysis. Shuya Zhao: Formal analysis. Zhaoyang Chen: Formal analysis. Yurui Xue: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Acknowledgements

This work was suported by the National Key Research and Development Project of China (2024YFA1509403, 2022YFA1204503), Basic Science Center Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22388101), Taishan Scholars Youth Expert Program of Shandong Province (tsqn201909050), and Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2021JQ07, ZR2024ZD02).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.chphma.2025.01.001.

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