Arcadia alumnus Shawn Chiu, who graduated with a BA in Chemistry in 2020, recently published “Corrosion and Enhanced Hydrogen Evolution in Electrochemical Reduction of Ammonium Carbamate on Transition Metal Surfaces” in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

The article explores catalyst activity and stability descriptors for the direct reactive capture and conversion (RCC) of CO2 in ammonia capture solutions using copper, silver, gold, tin, and titanium electrodes.

The two main occurrences found in RCC that are not found in the electrochemical CO2 reduction (CO2R) reaction were the rapid corrosion and restructuring of the catalyst in the presence of the CO2-ammonia adducts, meaning that the metals quickly corrode and change shape in the solution, and the promotion of the competing hydrogen evolution reaction (HER).

The study finds that the usual methods of forecasting the stability of catalysts under RCC conditions with the binding energy descriptors commonly used in CO2R activity prediction are a function of the applied potential and are not reliable here. There was no direct correlation between these calculated binding energies, ammonia, and the stability of transition metals needed for RCC. This highlights a need for new descriptors for CO2R.

Chiu, who went on to earn a BS in chemical engineering in 2022 from Columbia University and is a Theoretical and Computational Chemistry PhD Student at the University of California, Los Angeles, credits his time at Arcadia and mentorship by Dr. Manny Curotto, for leading him into the field of computational chemistry.