Team of Professor Tan Yongwen of Hunan University published electrocatalysis research work of nano porous metal compounds in nature

Recently, Professor Tan Yongwen's team of School of materials science and engineering of Hunan University published a research paper entitled "single platinumatoms embedded in nanoborous cobalt selenide as electronic system for accelerating hydrogen evolution reaction" (DOI: 10.1038 / s41467-019-09765-y) in nature communications Jiang Kang, a master's degree candidate of the research group, Liu Baiyang, Ph.D of Stockholm University, Sweden, and Luo min, an associate professor of Shanghai University of technology are the co authors of the paper, and Tan Yongwen is the corresponding author Professor Peng Ming and doctoral student Zhao Yang participated in the work Electrocatalytic water desorption hydrogen is a promising and sustainable energy technology Due to its unique electronic structure, platinum has high catalytic activity in hydrogen evolution, but its industrial application is limited by its high price Although the cost of non noble metal catalyst is low, its catalytic effect is difficult to compare with that of platinum In order to solve these problems, monatomic catalysts are widely concerned by researchers The atomic efficiency of the monoatomic catalyst is close to 100%, which not only reduces the cost of the catalyst, but also improves the intrinsic catalytic activity of the catalyst Although some studies have shown that the strong interaction between the isolated single atom and the support is the source of high catalytic activity, the catalyst involves a series of complex dynamic processes under real reaction conditions Therefore, it is a key problem and an important challenge for the design and preparation of high-efficiency catalysts to find out the reaction mechanism and the dynamic process of the active center under the real catalytic conditions Based on the above key problems, Professor Tan Yongwen's team selectively dissolved the cobalt atoms on the surface of nano porous cobalt selenide substrate through atomic engineering to form cobalt vacancy, and then embedded the platinum atoms into the cobalt vacancy of nano porous cobalt selenide substrate to prepare a single atom platinum doped catalyst with high catalytic activity at full pH The researchers further used in-situ synchrotron radiation and other characterization means to systematically study the single atom catalyst under the real catalytic conditions, and clarified that the isolated platinum atom can activate the catalytic activity of the surrounding inert cobalt atom to transform the cobalt atom into the active site of hydrolysis At the same time, single atom platinum can cooperate with the surrounding cobalt atoms to promote the thermodynamics and kinetics of hydrogen evolution This study not only provides direct evidence for the enhancement of catalyst activity caused by single atom doping, but also provides a new idea for the design of hydrogen evolution catalyst and other energy conversion catalyst The above research is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China, basic research fund of Central University and independent research and development project of National Key Laboratory of advanced design and manufacturing of automobile body of Hunan University At the same time, the study was supported by Dr Ning shou-cong of the National University of Singapore, Dr Zhan Dingshan of Taiwan synchrotron radiation center and Professor Frank F M de Groot of Utrecht University in Holland.