The Preparation of Au-Loaded Ti₃C₂ Nanosheet and Research on Its Electrocatalytic Nitrogen Reduction Performance

Abstract

As an important chemical raw material and potential energy, the preparation method of NH₃ has gradually attracted the attention of scholars. Due to the increasing pressure on environmental protection and the growing reduction of energy resources, researchers have been committed to do the research on the reduction of N₂ to NH₃ by electric energy, instead of the traditional preparation method. The electric energy is a kind of environmental-protection material compared with traditional materials. However, there are still many defects of these methods, such as slow reaction kinetics and competitive hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Therefore, how to improve the reaction rate and Faraday efficiency have become an urgent problem to be solved in the study of electrocatalytic nitrogen reduction. In this paper, Au³⁺ ions were electrostatically adsorbed on the surface of Ti₃C₂ nanosheets, which was a new ultra-thin two-dimensional conductive material, and Au@Ti₃C₂ samples with different contents were prepared by self-reduction of Au³⁺ ions to Au. The structure and performance tests showed that the Au nanoparticles on the surface of two-dimensional Ti₃C₂ nanosheets were nano sized. The nano scaled Au could promote the reduction of nitrogen and when the addition ratio of Au was 1%, Au@Ti₃C₂ showed the best performance and good stability.

Keywords:

• Self-reduction
• Ti₃C₂
• Au@Ti₃C₂
• NRR performance

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Funding for school-level research projects of Yancheng Institute of Technology (No. xjr2019031), the Science Foundation of Zhejiang Sci-Tech University (ZSTU) (No. 11152932612005 and 11150131722006), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52003239), and Key Research and Development Program of Zhejiang Province (No.2021C01074).