Highly efficient photocatalytic reduction of nitrogen into ammonia by single Ru atom catalyst supported by BeO monolayer

Ammonia (NH3) is one of the most important building blocks of the chemical industry and a promising sustainable energy carrier. Conventional production of NH3 via the Haber-Bosch process requires high temperature and high pressure, which is energy demanding and suffers safety issues. Photocatalytic nitrogen reduction reaction (NRR) is a green and sustainable route for NH3 production, and has been expected to be an alternative for NH3 production under mild conditions. However, solar-driven N-2 activated has appeared as the bottleneck for photocatalytic NRR. In this work, we propose that single Ru atom supported by BeO monolayer is a promising photocatalytic single atom catalyst (SAC) for efficient N-2 activation with visible illumination. The high efficiency originates from the enhanced absorption in the visible range, as well as the back-donation mechanism when N-2 were adsorbed on the SAC. Our results show that N-2 can be efficiently activated by the Ru/BeO SAC and be reduced to NH3 with extremely low limiting potential of -0.41 V. The NRR process also exhibits dominate selectivity respect to hydrogen evolution. (C) 2021 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Chinese Chemical Society and Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.

Automated summary

Ammonia is an important building block of the chemical industry, and photocatalytic nitrogen reduction reaction (NRR) is a green and sustainable route for its production. However, solar-driven N-2 activation has been a bottleneck. This research proposes a promising photocatalytic single atom catalyst (SAC) consisting of a single Ru atom supported by a BeO monolayer, which shows high efficiency in N-2 activation and reduction to ammonia.