The electrochemical reduction of CO2 to products such as CO, formic acid, and methanol provide an opportunity to create high energy fuel from an otherwise wasted and environmentally damaging feedstock. In this field there is a need to not only investigate creating catalysts that are more active and selective for the reduction of CO2 but also solutions to advance the integration and utility of these systems. A result of this is efforts towards immobilizing well understood molecular catalysts on conductive surfaces. Metal complexes with redox active 2,2′-bipyridine (bpy) ligands are a great model system for this because of their high activity for CO2 reduction, the wealth of mechanistic information known, and the easy synthetic tunability of the bpy ligand. In this study bpy-based molecular electrocatalysts are attached to conductive gold substrates, a common support for self-assembled monolayers. Both the strength of attachment strategies and orientation of the complexes on the surface are explored to gain fundamental knowledge about immobilized catalysis.

Attachment of molecular CO2 reduction catalysts to gold electrodes

251st National Meeting (2016)

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