Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 4, 2025

Ammonia Synthesis at Low Pressure
Published on: August 23, 2017
Accelerating ammonia synthesis in a membraneless flow electrolyzer through coupling ambient dinitrogen oxidation and
Jing-Jing Lv1, Zhe Li2, Jiaju Fu2
1Wenzhou Key Lab of Advanced Energy Storage and Conversion, Zhejiang Province Key Lab of Leather Engineering, College of Chemistry and Materials Engineering, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou 325035, China.
Abstract:
An electrochemical approach for ammonia production is successfully developed by coupling the anodic dinitrogen oxidation reaction (NOR) and cathodic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) within a well-designed membraneless flow electrolyzer. The obtained reactor shows the preferential yield of ammonia over nitrogen oxides on the vanadium nitride catalyst surface. At an applied oxidation potential of 2.25 V versus the reversible hydrogen electrode (vs RHE), a promoted ammonia production rate and Faradaic efficiency (FE) were obtained with 9.9 mmol g-1 h-1 (0.029 mmol cm-2 h-1) and 4.8%, respectively. Besides, the negative affection of ammonia contamination is efficiently alleviated. Density functional theory calculations revealed that the thermodynamic energy needed to produce ammonia (-0.63 eV) is far lower than that of producing nitrogen oxide (0.96 eV) from hydrogenated nitrogen oxides [∗N2OH] splitting, confirming the coupling of NOR and HER.
Related Concept Videos
Inorganic Nitrogen Assimilation
Chemiosmosis and ATP Synthesis
Preparation of 1° Amines: Gabriel Synthesis
Strong bases like NaOH or KOH deprotonate the phthalimide to form the corresponding anion, which acts as a nucleophile. Further, the anion attacks an...
Preparation of Amines: Alkylation of Ammonia and Amines
Each alkylation step makes the nitrogen center more nucleophilic, which triggers successive alkylations until a quaternary ammonium salt is formed. Considering...
Metabolism of Chemolithotrophs
Chemiosmosis
Electron Transport Chain
The electron transport chain involves a series of protein complexes on the inner mitochondrial membrane that undergo a series of redox reactions. At the end of this chain, the electrons...

