Cooperative multifunctional nanocarbon as efficient electro-catalysts for CO2 fixation to value-added cyclic carbonates under mild conditions

Abstract

A novel electrochemical route for efficient cycloaddition of CO2 and styrene oxide (SO) forming the value-added product of styrene carbonate (SC) was proposed in this manuscript using non-metallic nanocarbon material as the catalyst electrode. The synthesized hollow nanospheres (HNSs) nanocarbon materials exhibited unique advantages of porous structure with thin carbon layer, which effectively facilitated the mass and charge transfer process and promoted the electrochemical reaction kinetics. In addition, correlation between the detailed structure analysis and the catalytic activity evaluation results show that the cooperation of nitrogen and oxygen functionalities on nanocarbon played a vital role in enhancing the catalytic activity of the carbon materials. The optimized HNSs catalyst exhibited high SO conversion of 66.9% and SC selectivity of 99.8% under the chronoamperometry at −0.5 mA for 6 hs, showing great potential in practical applications. The structure-function relations reported here may shed light on the rational design of the nanocarbon catalyst electrode and related reaction system for electrochemical synthesis of SC.