Abstract: At the core of the pursuit of energy and environmental sustainability is the management of carbon and nitrogen cycles to produce high-value carbon-based fuels and nitrogen-based chemicals through new catalytic processes with high efficiency and minimal environmental impact. Electrocatalytic reactions, driven by solar/wind electricity, allow the conversion of CO2, N2, and nitrate, into chemicals and fuels. However, the costs and efficiencies of these reaction schemes need to be substantially improved before the large-scale implementation, which is to a large extent dependent on the understanding and optimization of catalysts in these schemes. Finding electrocatalytic materials with desired properties, i.e., moderate adsorption energies of descriptor species underpinned by the Sabatier principle, is a highly complex, multidimensional optimization process. Due to the ubiquitous adsorption-energy scaling relations that impose limits on attainable catalytic performance, it remains a grand challenge to design highly efficient electrocatalysts beyond such scaling relations. Meanwhile, the structural complexity of heterogeneous catalysts makes the design rule elusive, limiting our capability of developing high-performance catalysts. Well-defined, atomically precise materials allow us to bridge the knowledge gap between conventional single-crystal bulk materials and powder catalysts to achieve new understandings of structure-catalytic property relationships. In this talk, I will discuss our recent progress in developing well-defined catalysts for sustainable chemistry with a specific focus on electrochemical CO2 conversion and nitrate reduction. A new mechanism of breaking adsorption-energy scaling relations through Pauli repulsion that originates from orbital orthogonalization of the metal d-states with frontier orbitals of surface intermediates will be highlighted. Extending the design concept of active sites and their coordination environment to single-atom alloys will also be covered.
Bio: Huiyuan Zhu is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Virginia (UVA). Before joining UVA, she was an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Virginia Tech (VT). Her research focuses on tailoring multi-functional nanostructures for catalysis, energy conversion, and chemical transformation. She received her B.S. in Chemistry at the University of Science and Technology in China (2009), and her Ph.D. at Brown University, under the supervision of Prof. Shouheng Sun (2014). From 2014 to 2018, she was one of the inaugural Liane B. Russell Fellows and then a staff scientist in the Chemical Sciences Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She has received the 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship, 2022 NSF CAREER Award, 2021 Class of Influential Researcher from Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research, and 2022 Nanoscale Horizons, 2021 Nanoscale Emerging Investigator awards. She is also a recipient of the 2020 Jeffress Trust Award, the 2020 Ralph E Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, the 2020 Doctoral New Investigator Award of the ACS Petroleum Research Foundation, and the 2020 Journal of Materials Chemistry A Emerging Investigator Award.
10:30-11:30 a.m., Remsen Hall 1, refreshments to follow