AI Article Synopsis
- - The electrocatalytic process of converting ethylene glycol from polyethylene terephthalate into glycolic acid provides both economic and environmental advantages, though traditional methods struggle with rapid catalyst activity loss.
- - A new method using dynamic potential cycling significantly improves the stability and activity of noble metal catalysts, resulting in 20 times better performance over 60 hours compared to constant potential techniques.
- - This approach effectively removes surface oxides during the reaction and is versatile, working with various noble metals like palladium, gold, and platinum, particularly showing strong results with palladium in recent research.
Article Abstract
The electrocatalytic valorization of polyethylene terephthalate-derived ethylene glycol to valuable glycolic acid offers considerable economic and environmental benefits. However, conventional methods face scalability issues due to rapid activity decay of noble metal electrocatalysts. We demonstrate that a dynamic potential cycling approach, which alternates the electrode potential between oxidizing and reducing values, significantly mitigates surface deactivation of noble metals during electrochemical oxidation of ethylene glycol. This method enhances catalyst activity by 20 times compared to a constant-potential approach, maintaining this performance for up to 60 h with minimal deactivation. In situ Raman and X-ray absorption spectroscopy show that this effectiveness results from efficient removal of surface oxide during the reaction. The strategy is applicable to polyethylene terephthalate hydrolysates and various noble metals, such as palladium, gold, and platinum, with palladium showing a high conversion rate in recent studies. Our approach offers an efficient and durable method for electrochemical upcycling of biomass-derived compounds.
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Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11442646 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-52789-2 | DOI Listing |
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