Separation of Volatile Organic Compounds in TAMOF-1.

Separation of volatile organic compounds is one of the most studied processes in industry. TAMOF-1 is a homochiral metal-organic framework with a crystalline network of interconnected ≈1 nm channels and has high thermal and chemical stability. Thanks to these features, it can resolve racemic mixtures of chiral drugs as a chiral stationary phase in chromatography. Interestingly, the particular shape and size of its channels, along with the presence of metallic centers and functional groups, allow establishing weak but significant interactions with guest molecules. This opens interesting possibilities not only to resolve racemates but also to separate other organic mixtures, such as saturated/unsaturated and/or linear/branched molecules. In search of these applications, we have studied the separation of volatile organic compounds in TAMOF-1. Monte Carlo simulations in the grand-canonical ensemble have been carried out to evaluate the separation of the selected molecules. Our results predict that TAMOF-1 is able to separate xylene isomers, hexane isomers, and benzene-cyclohexane mixtures. Experimental breakthrough analysis in the gas phase and also in the liquid phase confirms these predictions. Beds of TAMOF-1 are able to recognize the substitution in xylenes and the branching in hexanes, yielding excellent separation and reproducibility, thanks to the chemical and mechanical features of this material.

Push-Pull Electronic Effects in Surface-Active Sites Enhance Electrocatalytic Oxygen Evolution on Transition Metal Oxides.

Sustainable electrocatalysis of the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) constitutes a major challenge for the realization of green fuels. Oxides based on Ni and Fe in alkaline media have been proposed to avoid using critical raw materials. However, their ill-defined structures under OER conditions make the identification of key descriptors difficult. Here, we have studied Fe-Ni-Zn spinel oxides, with a well-defined crystal structure, as a platform to obtain general understanding on the key contributions. The OER reaches maximum performance when: (i) Zn is present in the Spinel structure, (ii) very dense, equimolar 1 : 1 : 1 stoichiometry sites appear on the surface as they allow the formation of oxygen vacancies where Zn favors pushing the electronic density that is pulled by the octahedral Fe and tetrahedral Ni redox pair lowering the overpotential. Our work proves cooperative electronic effects on surface active sites as key to design optimum OER electrocatalysts.

Non-redox doping boosts oxygen evolution electrocatalysis on hematite.

The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is the major bottleneck to develop viable and cost-effective water electrolysis, a key process in the production of renewable fuels. Hematite, all iron α-Fe2O3, would be an ideal OER catalyst in alkaline media due to its abundance and easy processing. Despite its promising theoretical potential, it has demonstrated very poor OER activity under multiple experimental conditions, significantly worse than that of Co or Ni-based oxides. In the search for improving hematite performance, we have analysed the effect of doping with redox vs. non-redox active species (Ni or Zn). Our results indicate that Zn doping clearly outperforms Ni, commonly accepted as a preferred dopant. Zn-doped hematite exhibits catalytic performances close to the state-of-the-art for alkaline water splitting: reaching 10 mA cm-2 at just 350 mV overpotential (η) at pH 13, thus twenty times that of hematite. Such a catalytic enhancement can be traced back to a dramatic change in the reaction pathway. Incorporation of Ni, as previously suggested, decreases the energetic barrier for the OER on the available centres. In contrast, Zn facilitates the appearance of a dominant and faster alternative via a two-site reaction, where the four electron oxidation reaction starts on Fe, but is completed on Zn after thermodynamically favoured proton coupled electron transfer between adjacent metal centres. This unique behaviour is prompted by the non-redox character of Zn centres, which maintain the same charge during OER. Our results open an alternative role for dopants on oxide surfaces and provide a powerful approach for catalytic optimisation of oxides, including but not limited to highly preferred all-iron oxides.