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Organic Intercalation Enables Controllable Single-Atom Coordination for Efficient H2O2 Electrosynthesis
Xingjian Sun1, Yijing Chen1, Weihu Zhang1
1State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, China.
Abstract:
The electrochemical two-electron oxygen reduction reaction mediated by single-atom catalysts provides a sustainable and efficient route for on-site H2O2 production. Although heteroatom engineering of the first coordination sphere has been shown to effectively tune catalytic performance, existing strategies typically introduce heteroatoms through multistep processes, making it difficult to control the formation of the target coordination environment prior to pyrolysis. Herein, we propose an organic intercalation-driven precursor modulation strategy that pre-organizes coordinating atom sources to alter the thermodynamic preference for first-coordination-sphere formation during pyrolysis, enabling the preferential formation of the Co-N3O/C coordination environment. This potentially generalizable strategy offers a controllable alternative to conventional multi-step post-synthetic modification by enabling in situ coordination engineering. The resulting Co-N3O/C catalyst achieves an H2O2 selectivity of >99.0% and maintains stable operation for 120 h under ambient-air-fed conditions at a current density of 100 mA cm-2, accumulating a 3.2 wt% H2O2 solution. Crucially, the local coordination structure indicates that O incorporation tunes the electronic structure and modulates *OOH adsorption, thereby kinetically favoring *OOH protonation over O─O bond cleavage. This work provides a potentially generalizable strategy for controlling first-coordination-sphere formation in single-atom catalysts and offers deep insights into coordination-mediated enhancement for industrial-scale H2O2 electrosynthesis.
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Structural Isomerism
Isomers are different chemical species that have the same chemical formula. Structural isomerism of coordination compounds can be divided into two subcategories, the linkage isomers and coordination-sphere isomers.
Linkage isomers occur when the coordination compound contains a ligand that can bind to the transition metal center through two different atoms. For example, the CN− ligand can bind through the carbon atom or through the nitrogen atom. Similarly, SCN− can be...
