MATERIALS SCIENCE AND CHEMISTRY

As most notorious greenhouse gas, CO₂ emissions prevail as high as about 364 million tons carbon with the concentration reaching over 400 ppm in the atmosphere. A drastic reduction of CO₂ is urgently necessary for sustainable growth and to fight climate change. The electrochemical reduction of CO₂ (CO2RR) is a promising approach to utilize renewable electricity to convert CO₂ into chemical energy carriers at ambient conditions and in small-scale decentralized operation. Researchers from Technical University of Munich have employed an active-site screening approach and proposed carbon-rich molybdenum carbides as a promising CO2RR catalyst to produce methanol.

It is well-known that the catalytic properties of metals may extend beyond their melting point. Recently, this has been exploited to grow high-quality 2D materials such as graphene. To improve our understanding of the growth mechanism on liquid metal catalysts, researchers at the Technical University of Munich have employed a multi-scale modelling approach. Here, detailed simulations of various building blocks for the final graphene sheet such as simple hydrocarbons and smaller graphene flakes on solid and liquid Cu surfaces have been carried out. The insights from these simulations were then used to propose a mesoscopic model for the dynamics of graphene growth on molten Cu based on capillary and electrostatic interactions.