Electroreduction of volatile organic halides on activated silver cathodes

Abstract

The electroreduction of polychloromethanes and polychloroethanes has been studied by means of cyclic voltammetry (CV) and preparative electrolysis experiments in acetonitrile (ACN), dimethylformamide (DMF) and their admixtures with water. Silver has been used as cathode material, on account of our extended experience on its well established electrocatalytic activity toward reductive dehalogenation reactions of organic compounds. Polychloromethanes and -ethanes are common chlorinated solvents pertaining to the large family of volatile organic halides (VOH), whose high toxicity, or even carcinogenicity, demands careful treatment of contaminated soils, drinking waters and gaseous emissions. The results confirm the electrocatalytic role of silver and suggest a general route for the development of appropriate degradation processes.

How to Modify Solid Electrodes for Generating New Interfacial Processes — Another Approach in Electro-Chemical Catalysis

“…Among all those new catalytic electrodes, silver electrodes [19][20][21][22] appear mainly convenient for activating the catalytic scission of carbonhalogen bonds (Scheme 1.4). Within the same period, palladium electrodes also showed powerful capabilities to operate the catalytic reduction of alkyl and aromatic organic halides [23].…”

“…Homo-coupling reactions in high yield at surfaces strongly activated by chemical or electro-chemical grafting were developed. The use of transition metals such as Ag [20][21][22], Pd [23], Cu [24] as well as Pt [25] were promoted. The aim of this extended survey, although not complete, is to underline some possibilities both in solution, at the interface, and inside the conductor bulk (carbons, metals) that may not always be chemically modified and may contribute to accelerate the electron transfer rate.…”

Rapid screening of silver nanoparticles for the catalytic degradation of chlorinated pollutants in water

“…For this reason, the electrochemical reductive cleavage of carbon-halogen bonds in organic compounds, with the particular focus on volatile organic halides, has been mainly studied and developed in the last decades [10][11][12][13] being the subject of numerous studies in aqueous [14][15][16], non aqueous [17][18][19] and mixed solvents [13,20]. The great interest for this process is due to its important role in some environmental applications, such as the abatement of volatile polychlorinated organic compounds, a group of pollutants having hazardous effects on living beings and out of the scope of most EAOPs.…”

Gas-phase volatile organic chloride electroreduction: A versatile experimental setup for electrolytic dechlorination and voltammetric analysis

“…Among them, silver has been found to possess extraordinary electrocatalytic properties toward the C-X (X = Cl, Br, I) bond cleavage for synthetic [10,11,12,13,14] and environmental [15,16,17,18,19] applications. Therefore, in the last 10-15 years the electrocatalytic properties of silver, as cathode material for the VOH electroreduction, have been largely studied [2,15,19,20,21,22]. In particular the attention is focused on nanosized particles since they exhibit enhanced activity in comparison with bulk silver allowing the use of composite materials with very low metal loading [21,2].…”