| Ammonia fixation plays a vital role in the development of the chemical industry and agriculture,and also ammonia is a promising alternative energy carrier.The traditional Haber process requires high temperature and high pressure to synthesize ammonia and emits a large amount of CO2,which has a negative impact on the global greenhouse effect.Therefore,researchers are focusing on the development of efficient and environmental-friendly alternative ammonia fixation methods.Researchers are now focusing on nitrogen electroreduction to ammonia accounting for its advantages such as ambient conditions,environmental friendliness,use of sustainable clean energy,and facile control of ammonia.However,due to the extremely high triple bond energy in nitrogen and the fact that nitrogen is a non-polar molecule,it is difficult to activate nitrogen,resulting in the low yield and Faraday efficiency of the reported nitrogen electroreduction.Thus,researchers have made great efforts to improve the catalytic performance of nitrogen electroreduction catalysts.Herein,considering that doping is an effective approach to improve the catalytic performance of the catalysts,we synthesized boron-doped ruthenium nanoparticles as an efficient catalyst for nitrogen electroreduction.The incorporation of boron enhanced the ammonia yield rate and Faraday efficiency of ruthenium nanoparticles.At-0.2 V vs RHE,the ammonia yield rate of boron-doped ruthenium nanoparticles is 71.1 μgNH3 mgcat.-1 h-1,and at-0.1 V vs RHE the Faraday efficiency is 23.3%.Theoretical calculations demonstrated that doping with boron in ruthenium can reduce the reaction energy barrier of the nitrogen reduction reaction and increase the reaction selectivity,thus effectively improving the catalytic performance of the nitrogen electroreduction.This work demonstrates an efficient nitrogen electroreduction catalyst for ammonia fixation,which casts some light on the design of efficient catalysts for nitrogen electroreduction. |
