Li et al.’s “Exploiting thiolate/disulfide redox couples toward large-scale electrochemical carbon dioxide capture and release” recently appeared in Energy & Environmental Science. The research work focuses on exploiting novel redox couples toward large-scale electrochemical carbon dioxide capture and release. This work is done by a joint team and the team is led by Guo-Ming Weng, associate professor of Shanghai Key Laboratory of Hydrogen Science & Center of Hydrogen Science, School of Materials Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Other contributors are from Jilin University. The abstract appears below.

“Reducing global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is a critical issue that requires sustainable, energy-efficient and scalable solutions. Electrochemical carbon dioxide capture and release with redox active molecules has drawn an intense amount of interest, owing to its mild operation conditions, low energy consumption and high flexibility compared with traditional CO2 capture technologies. Here, we demonstrate a series of thiolate/disulfide redox couples, with high practical solubility and weak protonation ability, which are able to reversibly capture and release CO2. The mechanism of CO2 capture and release using such redox couples is elucidated via combining density functional theory (DFT) calculations, cyclic voltammetry and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy measurements. Furthermore, we show that the redox performance of such materials can be significantly improved by functional group tuning and electrolyte engineering. Among them, the 4-fluorophenyl thiolate/4-fluorophenyl disulfide redox couple shows an initial CO2 capacity utilization efficiency and average release/capture efficiency of ∼100% and ∼90%, respectively, under simulated flue gas (20% CO2) in a flow system. Besides, it exhibits good cycling stability against moisture. This work opens new opportunities to future works in developing thiolate/disulfide redox couples for large-scale electrochemical carbon dioxide capture and release applications.”

Figure 1. A scalable flow system with a series of highly soluble thiolate/disulfide-based sorbents for large-scale electrochemical CO2 capture and release.

This work is supported by Shanghai Key Laboratory of Hydrogen Science & Center of Hydrogen Science of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Shanghai High-Level Oversea Talents Award, etc.

Read the full article: https://doi.org/10.1039/D4EE04739G