ChemBE Seminar Series: Huiyuan Zhu

Description

Huiyuan Zhu, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Virginia, will give a talk titled "Engineering Well-Defined Catalysts with Atomic Precision for Sustainable Chemistry" for the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

Abstract:

At the core of the pursuit of energy and environmental sustainability is the management of carbon and nitrogen cycles to produce high-value carbon-based fuels and nitrogen-based chemicals through new catalytic processes with high efficiency and minimal environmental impact. Electrocatalytic reactions, driven by solar/wind electricity, allow the conversion of CO2, N2, and nitrate, into chemicals and fuels. However, the costs and efficiencies of these reaction schemes need to be substantially improved before the large-scale implementation, which is to a large extent dependent on the understanding and optimization of catalysts in these schemes. Finding electrocatalytic materials with desired properties, i.e., moderate adsorption energies of descriptor species underpinned by the Sabatier principle, is a highly complex, multidimensional optimization process. Due to the ubiquitous adsorption-energy scaling relations that impose limits on attainable catalytic performance, it remains a grand challenge to design highly efficient electrocatalysts beyond such scaling relations. Meanwhile, the structural complexity of heterogeneous catalysts makes the design rule elusive, limiting our capability of developing high-performance catalysts. Well-defined, atomically precise materials allow us to bridge the knowledge gap between conventional single-crystal bulk materials and powder catalysts to achieve new understandings of structure-catalytic property relationships. In this talk, I will discuss our recent progress in developing well-defined catalysts for sustainable chemistry with a specific focus on electrochemical CO2 conversion and nitrate reduction. A new mechanism of breaking adsorption-energy scaling relations through Pauli repulsion that originates from orbital orthogonalization of the metal d-states with frontier orbitals of surface intermediates will be highlighted. Extending the design concept of active sites and their coordination environment to single-atom alloys will also be covered.

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