New electrolyte found can help better ammonia synthesis

January 5, 2023January 5, 2023 MTIMES

New Delhi: A new electrolyte found can help make electrochemical ammonia synthesis more efficient will be useful for industries producing green energy or hydrogen.

The electrochemical synthesis of ammonia is largely limited by the poor solubility of nitrogen (N2) in the aqueous electrolyte environment as well as the competing reaction of hydrogen evolution. The hurdle was that N2 actually decreased in the aqueous environment. In an attempt to solve these problems, they usually look at the “ambient” conditions.

Researchers mostly work on catalyst development, while electrolyte improvisation still remains in infancy. According to a recent report, 90.7 % of the research works related to Nitrogen reduction reaction (NRR) have focused on the suitable catalyst development, while only 4.7 % have been devoted to work on the electrolytes.

Scientists from Institute of Nano Science and Technology (INST) Mohali, have introduced a new electrolyte called (NaBF4), which not only acts as an N2-carrier in the medium but also works as a full-fledged “co-catalyst” along with active material transition metal-doped nanocarbon (MnN4) to deliver high yield of ammonia (NH3) at absolutely ambient experimental conditions.

The high rate of NH3 production approached industrial scale and outperformed almost all standard catalysts in any other electrolyte medium. The source of NH3 has been thoroughly investigated and confirmed to be mainly from the electrochemical reduction of purified N2 gas (make it a saturated N2 electrolyte to convert N2 to NH3.

This research published in the journal PNAS is a novel approach to get through the long-standing issues about the solubility of N2 in aqueous medium and achieve industrial scale production rate of ammonia by NRR at ambient condition.

This work supported by DST SERB brings an user friendly aqueous electrolyte (NaBF4) which can encourage researchers to work more on aqueous electrolyte designing towards an even improved NRR performance of the electro catalysts. A patent has been filed for this work and the scientists are now working towards making electrolyzer for rapid rate of ammonia production at an industrial scale.