Development of Iron and Nickel-Based Nanocatalysts for CO₂ Fixation and Alkaline Water Oxidation

Tudu, Gouri (2021) Development of Iron and Nickel-Based Nanocatalysts for CO₂ Fixation and Alkaline Water Oxidation. PhD thesis, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata.

Text (PhD thesis of Gouri Tudu (15RS009)) 15RS009.pdf - Submitted Version Restricted to Repository staff only Download (15MB)

Abstract

To mitigate the global warming and its adverse effects on environment there is an urgent need to control the increasing concentration of anthropogenic CO₂ in atmosphere. The major source of CO₂ emission is burning of fossil fuels by industries and automobiles. One of the strategies to control the concentration of CO₂ in atmosphere is fixation of CO₂ into value-added chemicals which is advantageous from both environmental and economical point of views. In this context, insertion of CO₂ into epoxides to form cyclic carbonates is interesting due to their industrial importance. However, the major challenge associated with this transformation is the requirement of drastic reaction conditions. Again, the harmful effect of burning fossil fuels on environment and their scarcity propel development of sustainable energy resources. In terms of clean energy, hydrogen is a zero emission fuel with high specific energy and a potential candidate to replace fossil fuels. For the production of H₂ fuel, electrochemical water splitting (EWS) has been considered as a clean, efficient, and sustainable technique. The EWS involves two half-cell reactions, oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Among them OER is more challenging due to the sluggish kinetics for the involvement of multiple electrons in the process which demands the efficient electrocatalysts to facilitate the reaction. To cope with the global warning as well as energy crisis we have adopted two different approaches, (i) utilization of CO₂ as a C1 feedstock for the preparation of cyclic carbonates through the insertion of CO₂ into epoxide molecules and (ii) generation of clean H₂ fuel through electrolysis of water. Some of the major challenges related to EWS are developing stable and robust non-noble metal OER electrocatalysts, gaining knowledge on mechanism for the catalytic process, studying structural transformation to determine the real active phases and sites for non-noble-metal based (e.g. chalcogenides) materials. To address the above mentioned challenges we aimed to develop transition metal-based nanocatalysts, in particular, iron and nickel-based materials for efficient CO₂ fixation under ambient conditions and facile alkaline water oxidation for electrocatalytic water splitting.

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