Interfacial interactions of Cu/MnOOH enhance ammonia synthesis from electrochemical nitrate reduction

In this work, an effective catalyst of Cu/MnOOH has been successfully constructed for electrochemical nitrate reduction reaction (eNO3RR) for synthesis of ammonia (NH3) under ambient conditions. The substrate of MnOOH plays an important role on the size and electronic structure of Cu nanoparticles, where Cu has the ultrafine size of 2.2 nm and positive shift of its valence states, which in turn causes the increased number of Cu active sites and enhanced intrinsic activity of every active site. As a result, this catalyst realizes an excellent catalytic performance on eNO3RR with the maximal NH3 Faraday efficiency (FE) (96.8%) and the highest yield rate (55.51 mg h−1 cm−2) at a large NH3 partial current density of 700 mA/cm2, which could help to promote the industrialization of NH3 production under ambient conditions.