Bioinspired Nanometal Synthesis and Applications in Catalysis

Download or read book Bioinspired Nanometal Synthesis and Applications in Catalysis written by Yani Pan and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Electrocatalysis, which facilitates the interconversion between electric and chemical energy, has been considered as an efficient and green route to produce clean energy and chemical feedstocks. Nevertheless, conventional chemical protocols for synthesizing nanosized metallic electrode materials frequently involve the use of non-natural stabilizing additives, hazardous solvents and high temperature, which requires high energy input and raise some environmental concerns. Searching for green catalysts with excellent catalytic performances are highly desired. In this regard, bioinspired syntheses are emerging as greener and more energy-efficient alternatives, since they enable fabrication of well-patterned hierarchical micro and nanostructures under mild reaction conditions. Among the different biological scaffolds, proteins are characterized by their diverse architectures, abundant binding sites and engineerable amino acid residues. This thesis presents the utilization of a tobacco mosaic virus coat protein (TMVCP) as a versatile platform to synthesize a series of metallic nanomaterials and their applications in energy related electrocatalytic reactions. Taking advantage of the self-assembly properties of TMVCP under different solution conditions, nanoparticles can be embedded onto the disk protein surface or capped by protein subunits. We show that in addition to the eco-friendly synthesis merit, the as prepared materials are superior catalysts in electrocatalytic reactions. While the nanosized silver rings exhibit significant enhancement towards catalyzing electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction reaction, the two TMVCP-templated platinum catalysts are promising candidates for methanol oxidation reaction. Besides electrocatalysis, potential applications of protein-metal hybrid systems in heterogeneous organic synthesis are also described. Gold and palladium nanoparticles capped by the bulky protein subunits are employed for two organic reactions and also showed remarkable kinetics. Possible origins for the improved catalytic behaviors brought by these materials are explored. This thesis is expected to stimulate more research on employing natural ligands to protect nanostructures and discover their applications in catalysis and energy related areas"--