Expeditious Construction of a Nickel-Based Precatalyst at Ambient Conditions for Efficient Electrocatalytic Biomass...

Electrochemical 5-hydroxymethylfurfural oxidation reaction (HMFOR) offers a sustainable route for producing value-added organic chemicals. Nickel-based electrocatalysts are promising candidates due to their intrinsic redox capabilities, but there is still a lack of facile, scalable, and cost-effective strategies to fabricate electrocatalysts with high activity and selectivity. To make a positive contribution to simplify the electrocatalyst preparation, herein in this work, a phytic acid-induced etching strategy was developed to obtain electrodes for HMFOR, which demonstrated outstanding HMFOR performance with 99.1% HMF conversion, 98.7% FDCA yield, and 96.8% Faraday efficiency within 3 h at 1.47 V (vs RHE). In situ Raman spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis revealed that PA optimized the electron transfer efficiency and accelerated the surface reconstruction of nickel phytate toward NiOOH serving as active sites. Moreover, Ni-PA@NF exhibited excellent stability, with only 0.6% performance decline after 48 h of continuous operation at 50 mA cm^-2. Scalable preparation of the electrode was also realized with maintained catalytic performance. This strategy highlights the advantages of rapid and scalable catalyst preparation (30 min), readily available starting materials, and clean and mild conditions, providing a cost-effective and highly efficient strategy for electrocatalytic biomass upgrading.