Unbalancing the Hydrogen Bond Accepting and Donating Effects of Water for Photoelectrocatalytic Ammonia Oxidation Reaction.

The ammonia oxidation reaction (AOR) is the key reaction in ammonia splitting for hydrogen production and wastewater treatment, in which N-H cleavage and N-N formation are the key steps. In this work, we demonstrate that the hydrogen-bond accepting effect from H2O to NH3 plays the pivotal role in accelerating the N-H cleavage, while the hydrogen-bond donating effect from H2O to NH3 inhibits the N-N formation of NH3 nucleophilic attack. Alkali metal cations are further applied to unbalance the hydrogen-bond accepting and -donating effects, among which the large-size cations assist in breaking the hydrogen bonds among H2O-H2O and H2O-NH3. The resulting isolated H2O and NH3 molecules promote the accepting effect and suppress the donating effect, which enhance the activity of photoelectrocatalytic AOR by 8 times on BiVO4 photoanodes. This study illustrates the molecular-level understanding of the hydrogen-bonding effect in AOR mechanisms and to develop efficient AOR systems.

• Publication year

  2026

• Venue

  Journal of the American Chemical Society

• Publication date

  2026-03-04

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Chemistry, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1021/jacs.5c18983PMID 41779949
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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