Single Platinum Atom and Confined Electrocatalysis in the context of Energy Storage (24/03/25)
Speaker and Affliation:
Professor David Zitoun
Department of Chemistry and Bar-Ilan Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
When?
24th March, 2025 (Monday), 03.30 PM (India Standard Time)
Where
KPA Auditorium, Dept. of Materials Engineering, IISc, Bangalore
Abstract:
Single Atom Catalysis has revisited the concept of bridging the best of two worlds from homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, which has implications in energy and sustainability. The long-time concept of nanotechnology has been applied to catalytic nanoparticles and clusters, and “confinement effects” (like the particle in a box model) have only recently been applied to the reagents and products of reaction “confined” in a nanosized reactor. Herein, a strongly confined system has been designed and synthesized to demonstrate the nanoconfinement effects. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with inner diameter as low as 14 Å have been filled with a Pt single atom catalyst [1]. The kinetics of the HOR reaction in alkaline are slowed down by the confinement effect, with a high overpotential observed for Pt in CNT compared with a non-confined Pt catalyst. This effect was observed to a lower extent in CNT with a larger diameter. On the other hand, nanoconfinement does not slow down the kinetics in acidic medium for any of these three types of catalyst. This phenomenon can be explained by the mass transport limitations of OH- in 14 Å CNT, affecting the Heyrovsky rate determining step in alkaline medium; density functional theory calculations confirm the energy barrier for OH- to diffuse in the CNT. This approach has been useful for redox-flow batteries [2] and water splitting [3]. In general, we shall also give an overview of the synthetic and catalytic examples for energy applications.
References:
- Shanmugasundaram, M., Samala, N. R., Grinberg, I. & Zitoun, D. Pt Single-Atom Catalysis in Carbon Nanotubes as a Platform for Confinement Limited Electrocatalysis. ACS Catal 14, 13877–13882 (2024).
- Hardisty, S. S., Saadi, K., Nagaprasad Reddy, S., Grinberg, I. & Zitoun, D. Ionically selective carbon nanotubes for hydrogen electrocatalysis in the hydrogen–bromine redox flow battery. Mater Today Energy 24, 100937 (2022).
- Hardisty, S. S., Lin, X., Kucernak, A. R. J. & Zitoun, D. Single-atom Pt on carbon nanotubes for selective electrocatalysis. Carbon Energy 1–9 (2023) doi:10.1002/cey2.409.
Speaker Bio:
Prof. David Zitoun’s laboratory specializes in wet chemical synthesis techniques to create nanomaterials for applications in energy and health fields. Specifically focusing on electrochemical energy storage and conversion, the lab aims to develop advanced materials with improved performance and efficiency. By exploring the properties and behavior of nanomaterials at a molecular level, the Zitoun group seeks to enhance technologies such as batteries, sensors, electrolyzers, and more. Currently a full Professor in the department of Chemistry and the Bar-Ilan Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, Prof. David Zitoun did his PhD in Coordination Chemistry from the University of Toulouse, France, under the mentorship of Dr. Bruno Chaudret and followed his PhD with a post-doctoral stint in Prof. Peidong Yang’s group in University of California Berkeley. Prior to joining Bar-Ilan, Prof. Zitoun served as a lecturer in University Montpellier. Currently, he acts as the founder and CSO of Fast Sense and is a scientific advisor to Oxygenium. He has graduated 16 PhDs, has 132 peer-reviewed publications, and 10 patents.