Ultralow Ru loading RuO2-TiO2 with strong oxide-support interaction for efficient chlorine evolution and ammonia-nitrogen-elimination

Abstract

Chlorine evolution reaction (CER) usually requires catalyst with high content of noble metals for applications at large current density, thus hindering its industrial development. In this work, TiO2 nanobelts supported RuO2 nanoparticles (RuO2-TiO2 NBs-Ti) with ultralow Ru loading (0.83 wt%) is synthesized. It exhibits high activity for CER with 50 mA cm−2 at only 1.13 V (vs. SCE) and mass activity of 57.1 A g−1Ru at 1.14 V, surpassing the dimensionally stable anode (DSA). And the activity can stably maintain at large current density of 300 mA cm−2 for 408 h. Furthermore, it also shows high performance for degradation of NH4+−N (98.9% within 90 min). The ideal performance is ascribed to the strong oxide-support interaction (SOSI) that tunes the interfacial electronic structure between mixing antase-rutile-TiO2 and RuO2, which improves the Volmer-Heyrovsky kinetic of CER. Meanwhile, it possesses nanobelt structure with a larger specific surface area, which can provide more active sites and is beneficial to the escape of bubbles on the electrode surface. This work provides a prospective direction for the synthesis of low-cost and high-activity CER catalyst at large current density.