121st General Meeting of the KCS

Type Symposium
Area Recent Trends in Electrocatalyst
Room No. Room 202A
Time THU 15:40-:
Code ELEC1-1
Subject Electrochemical N2 Reduction to Produce NH3 at Low Temperature and Atmospheric Pressure
Authors Hyun S. Park
Fuel Cell Research Center, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
Abstract NH3 is the essential chemical in modern industry to produce N-containing commodity and fuels. The amount of global NH3 production is larger than 150 million tonnes per year, reporting it as one of the most produced chemicals in the world. It is widely synthesized from purified N2 and H2 by the thermochemical process named Haber-Bosch, under high reaction temperature and pressure, i.e. 150-250 bar and 400-500 ℃, respectively. The Haber process uses approximately 2% of the total world energy consumption and takes approximately 1% of the total world CO2 emission employing fossil fuel energy sources. Recently, electrochemical reduction of N2 is considered as a promising method for the NH3 production only using renewable electricity with zero-carbon emission. The electrochemical synthesis of NH3 can be performed with a thermodynamic voltage of 1.18 V at room temperature. The proton required to produce NH3 can directly be supplied via water oxidation at anode, so to utilize water and N2 in air as the reactants, making the electrochemical NH3 production simple and economically efficient. However, the triple bond of dinitrogen molecule is significantly stable with a bonding energy of approximately 940 kJ/mol, and no electrocatalyst is yet known with a practical activity toward the N2 reduction. In the presentation, preliminary experimental results will be discussed for the electrochemical synthesis of NH3 at low temperature and atmospheric pressure. The activity and selectivity of few promising N2 reduction electrocatalysts are studied for the electrochemical NH3 synthesis under different reaction conditions.
E-mail hspark@kist.re.kr