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Updated: Sep 3, 2025

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Regulating the spin state of single-atom doped covalent triazine frameworks for efficient nitrogen fixation
Lei Fang1, Gaozhang Gou1, Jin Shang2
1Shanghai Key Lab of Chemical Assessment and Sustainability, School of Chemical Science and Engineering, Tongji University, 1239 Siping Road, Shanghai 200092, China.
Abstract:
Covalent triazine frameworks (CTFs), served as a versatile platform, can form expedient metal-N single-atom coordination sites as promising catalytic centers. To seek out excellent candidate catalysts of M/CTFs (M = Transition metal) for nitrogen reduction reaction (NRR), a "five-step" strategy involving spin states has been established for hierarchical high-throughput screening and reveals strong coordination ability of the CTFs, outstanding conductivity of the M/CTFs, effective adsorption and activation of N2* attributed to the electron transfer and orbital hybridization between the M/CTFs and N2*. Among the potential candidates, the Cr/CTF is screened out to be an excellent one for nitrogen fixation, which can not only inhibit hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) greatly but also has good thermodynamic stability (Eb = -4.40 eV), narrow band gap (Eg = 0.03 eV), moderate adsorption energy (Ea = -0.84 eV), large activation energy (ΔGN2* = -0.71 eV) and a theoretical Faradaic efficiency of 100%. The spin state has been confirmed to be an important descriptor of catalytic activity and the two-state reactivity (TSR) is validated to exist in the NRR. Reaction mechanism with different spin states of Cr/CTF has been demonstrated to give a great impact on the nitrogen fixation, providing solid theoretical support for the design of more efficient NRR catalysts.
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