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Updated: May 9, 2026

Ammonia Synthesis at Low Pressure
Published on: August 23, 2017
Accelerated Tandem Catalysis for Industrial-Level Nitric Oxide Electroreduction to Ammonia
Yong-Chao Zhang1,2, Long Liu1, Yingnan Wang1
1State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Polymer and Manufacturing Technology, College of Chemical Engineering, Qingdao University of Science & Technology, Qingdao, China.
None:
State-of-the-art nonprecious metal catalysts for electrocatalytic nitric oxide reduction (NORR) to NH3 suffer from mass transfer limitation and hydrogen evolution competition at industrial current densities. Herein, we report a class of self-supporting wheat-shaped oxygen vacancy-rich Co3O4- x/Cu electrocatalyst for achieving industrial-level nitric oxide electroreduction to NH3. We demonstrate a tandem mechanism wherein Co3O4- x enables water dissociation to generate active *H and the presence of oxygen vacancies reduce the reverse spillover energy of *H migration for the NORR, while highly conductive Cu sites facilitate the adsorption and activation of *NO, and promote hydrogenation and subsequent N-O bond cleavage, and ultimately enable NH3 desorption. The Co3O4- x/Cu catalyst delivers an unprecedented NH3 yield of 938.6 ± 11.8 µmol h-1 cm-2 and Faradaic efficiency (FE) of 94.9 ± 0.4% at -1.0 V against a reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE) and maintains exceptional stability of > 350 h under industrial-level current density of 300 mA cm-2, outperforming previously reported catalysts. As a proof of concept, the Co3O4- x/Cu catalyst-based Zn-NO battery has a record power density of 9.4 mW cm-2 and NH3 yield of 752.1 ± 10 µg h-1 cm-2.
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