Cost-Effective H2 O2 -Regeneration of Powdered Activated Carbon by Isolated Fe Sites.

The reuse of powdered activated carbon (PAC) vitally determines the economics and security of the PAC-based adsorption process, while state-of-the-art PAC regeneration technologies are usually unsatisfactory. Here, it is demonstrated that isolated Fe sites anchored on commercial PAC enable fast H2 O2 activation to produce Fe-based reactive oxygen species for highly efficient PAC regeneration at room temperature. Taking rhodamine B as a representative pollutant, PAC decorated with isolated Fe sites realize H2 O2 based regeneration with negligible adsorption capacity degradation for 10 cycles. Moreover, in terms of the PAC loss rate, this technology is greatly superior to traditional Fenton-based regeneration technology. Further operando experiments and theoretical calculations reveal that the high regeneration performance can be attributed to the isolated HOFeO motifs, which activate H2 O2 via a nonradical reaction pathway. These findings provide a very promising strategy toward reducing the cost of H2 O2 -based PAC regeneration technology.

Large-Scale, Low-Cost, and High-Efficiency Water-Splitting System for Clean H2 Generation.

Scaling up electrochemical water splitting is nowadays in high demand for hydrogen economy implementation. Tremendous efforts over the past decade have been focused on exploring alternative catalytic materials, including a variety of earth-abundant transition-metal-based catalysts, to replace traditional noble metals such as Pt, Ir, or Ru. Nevertheless, few efforts have been carried out for (1) scalable catalyst synthesis on current collectors and (2) practical device design toward large-scale H2 generation. Herein, we designed a modular alkaline water-splitting electrolyzer system with scaled-up metal foam electrodes covered by low-cost NiMo alloy and Ni3Fe oxide for efficient hydrogen evolution and oxygen evolution, respectively. An electrolyte circulation system facilitates the mass transport and thus can further boost the H2 generation particularly under large currents. As a result, the overall water-splitting performance of one-unit cell with a dimension of 10 × 10 cm2 under room temperature presents an early onset voltage of 1.54 V and delivered practical currents of 20 and 55 A (9.1 and 25.0 L/h H2 generation) under 2.2 and 2.9 V without iR compensations, respectively. This demonstration could stimulate new focuses in water splitting toward more practical applications.