Reseach led by Chengliang Mao, a visiting graduate student in the Ozin Lab, has been published this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Optimizing the kinetic barriers of ammonia synthesis to reduce the energy intensity has attracted significant research interest; however, discovering a means by which the activation barriers of N2 dissociation and NHz destabilization can be reduced simultaneously have proven challenging.
In this work, Mao and co-authors demonstrate the scaling relationship for ammonia synthesis can be broken in a hybrid catalyst, featuring a Fe nanocrystal necklace integrated with hydrogen-laden titanium oxide nanoparticles with cascade oxygen vacancies that enables facile activation of N2 and hydrogenation of the N or NHz to NH3.
Read the full article.