The Preparation of Au-Loaded Ti3C2 Nanosheet and Research on Its Electrocatalytic Nitrogen Reduction Performance

Abstract

As an important chemical raw material and potential energy, the preparation method of NH3 has gradually attracted the attention of scholars. Due to the increasing pressure on environmental protection and the growing reduction of energy resources, researchers have been committed to do the research on the reduction of N2 to NH3 by electric energy, instead of the traditional preparation method. The electric energy is a kind of environmental-protection material compared with traditional materials. However, there are still many defects of these methods, such as slow reaction kinetics and competitive hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Therefore, how to improve the reaction rate and Faraday efficiency have become an urgent problem to be solved in the study of electrocatalytic nitrogen reduction. In this paper, Au3+ ions were electrostatically adsorbed on the surface of Ti3C2 nanosheets, which was a new ultra-thin two-dimensional conductive material, and Au@Ti3C2 samples with different contents were prepared by self-reduction of Au3+ ions to Au. The structure and performance tests showed that the Au nanoparticles on the surface of two-dimensional Ti3C2 nanosheets were nano sized. The nano scaled Au could promote the reduction of nitrogen and when the addition ratio of Au was 1%, Au@Ti3C2 showed the best performance and good stability.