Research development of materials chemistry for clean energy is one of the important topics in the iChEM, and especially, materials creation and methods applied are the key issues. The iChEM Professors Shi-Gang Sun of XMU and Wen-Bin Cai of FDU‘s research groups cooperated on electrocatalysis of ethanol on a Pd electrode in Alkaline Media and made significant progress as the follows: They have investigated the surface reaction of ethanol on Pd in alkaline media using ATR-SEIRAS and H-D isotope replacement on α-C to improve our understanding of the self-dissociation and oxidation processes relevant to the Pt-free anode of DEFCs. This study may provide a hint about the design of novel anode catalysts for DEFCs as it suggests that inhibiting direct oxidation of adsorbed acetyl should be effective for enhancing the C1 pathway of EOR. This work was selected as ACS Editor’s Choice (ACS Catal. 2014, 4, 798-803).

On the other hand, facile production of hydrogen at room temperature is an important process in many areas including alternative energy. These two research groups recently presented an initial report on metalloid-doped Pd nanocatalysts for efficient H2 production from aqueous FA-SF at ambient conditions. The effective metalloid doping coupled with high sensitivity ATR-IR measurements offers a promising approach to designing new catalysts for efficient dehydrogenation of formic acid (J. Am. Chem. Soc.上(DOI:10.1021/ja5008917)).

This work is supported by NSFC (Nos. 21073045 and 21273046), SMCST (Nos. 11JC140200 and 08DZ2270500).