Kinetically restrained oxygen reduction to hydrogen peroxide with nearly 100% selectivity
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Updated: Sep 22, 2025

Light-driven Enzymatic Decarboxylation
Published on: May 22, 2016
Jinxing Chen1,2, Qian Ma1,2, Xiliang Zheng1
1State Key Laboratory of Electroanalytical Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, 130022, China.
Abstract:
Hydrogen peroxide has been synthesized mainly through the electrocatalytic and photocatalytic oxygen reduction reaction in recent years. Herein, we synthesize a single-atom rhodium catalyst (Rh1/NC) to mimic the properties of flavoenzymes for the synthesis of hydrogen peroxide under mild conditions. Rh1/NC dehydrogenates various substrates and catalyzes the reduction of oxygen to hydrogen peroxide. The maximum hydrogen peroxide production rate is 0.48 mol gcatalyst-1 h-1 in the phosphorous acid aerobic oxidation reaction. We find that the selectivity of oxygen reduction to hydrogen peroxide can reach 100%. This is because a single catalytic site of Rh1/NC can only catalyze the removal of two electrons per substrate molecule; thus, the subsequent oxygen can only obtain two electrons to reduce to hydrogen peroxide through the typical two-electron pathway. Similarly, due to the restriction of substrate dehydrogenation, the hydrogen peroxide selectivity in commercial Pt/C-catalyzed enzymatic reactions can be found to reach 75%, which is 30 times higher than that in electrocatalytic oxygen reduction reactions.
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