Abstract
Electrochemical production of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) from water oxidation could provide a very attractive route to locally produce a chemically valuable product from an abundant resource. Herein using density functional theory calculations, we predict trends in activity for water oxidation towards H2O2 evolution on four different metal oxides, i.e., WO3, SnO2, TiO2 and BiVO4. The density functional theory predicted trend for H2O2 evolution is further confirmed by our experimental measurements. Moreover, we identify that BiVO4 has the best H2O2 generation amount of those oxides and can achieve a Faraday efficiency of about 98% for H2O2 production.
Highlights
Electrochemical production of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) from water oxidation could provide a very attractive route to locally produce a chemically valuable product from an abundant resource
We use the computational hydrogen electrode (CHE) model, which exploits that the chemical potential of a proton–electron pair is equal to gas-phase H2 at standard conditions
We utilized density functional theory (DFT) calculations in conjunction with experimental measurements to study the activity of two-electron water oxidation towards H2O2 evolution over four metal oxides, namely WO3, BiVO4, SnO2 and TiO2
Summary
Electrochemical production of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) from water oxidation could provide a very attractive route to locally produce a chemically valuable product from an abundant resource. One of the attractive possible routes for is via two-electron oxidation of ewleactetrro(cEhqe.m1i)c1a0l–H122: O2 generation This process (Eq 2) is desirable since it can be coupled with hydrogen evolution reaction (Eq 2) to simultaneously produce two valuable products: H2O2 and H2 (Eq 3) in a single electrochemical device using only water as raw material. Such a device can be coupled with photoabsorbers to utilize sunlight for both reactions:. The two-electron water oxidation (Eq 1) must compete with the four-electron oxidation reaction for O2 generation (Eq 4) and the one-electron oxidation reaction for producing OH radical (Eq 5)[12]
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have