Catalyst Synthesis and Characterization

High temperature tubular furnace: We use tube furnace to calcine or reduce catalyst material samples under vacuum and inert gas conditions or reducible H2/N2 forming gas at high temperature up to 1800 °C.

Advanced automized microwave reactor: We use microwave reactor, CEM Discover 2.0, to synthesize various catalysts based on precious/nonprecious metals and alloys. This device enables wide range of temperature, pressurized conditions in sealed reaction vessels. This effectively replaces traditional wet-chemical and autoclave apparatuses. Synthesis batch can be flexibly performed in various vessel sizes: 10, 35, 100 mL or 125mL round-bottom flask with magnetic stirring functionality. Moreover, we develop high-throughput methods using auto samplers with 48 position modules. This enables fully automated reaction synthesis and therefore can quickly and systematically study multi metal catalysts with various compositions

Rotating disc electrode: We use rotating disc electrode (RDE) method to screen and control the quality of our synthesized catalysts. Promising catalysts will be up scaled to large batches for MEA fabrications and testing.

CO2 electrolysis: For developing catalyst and electrode configuration, we use flow cell system equipped with Biologics VMP-300 potentiostat and a Thermo Scientific Trace 1310 gas chromatograph for product analysis.

Last Modified: 14.07.2022