CHE 598 Seminar: Unlocking New Electrocatalytic Functionality through Solid Acid-Metal Cooperation

About the event

SPEAKER: Dr. Juye Kim, Assistant Professor, School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering, Oregon State University.

BIOGRAPHY:

Juye Kim has been an Assistant Professor in the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering (CBEE) at Oregon State University since September 2025. Her research focuses on electrochemistry for sustainable energy conversion. She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Sungkyunkwan University in 2014 and her Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from KAIST in 2020. After completing her first postdoctoral training at KAIST, she continued her research at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT), where she expanded her research scope to biomass electro-oxidation. She then worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University, where she broadened her expertise to include computational approaches.  Her research interests span electrochemical interfaces across multiple scales, from atomic-scale understanding to laboratory systems and scale-up. Moving forward, she aims to build an internally collaborative research group that bridges experimental and computational approaches, enabling synergistic advances in sustainable energy technologies and practical contributions to real-world applications.

ABSTRACT:

Electrocatalytic reactions are strongly influenced by the local chemical environment surrounding active sites, yet controlling this environment remains a major challenge in catalyst design. In this seminar, I will discuss how the well-established concept of metal–acid cooperation in heterogeneous catalysis can be extended to electrocatalysis by integrating solid acid functionality into an electrically conductive catalyst framework.

To investigate this concept, Pt nanoclusters were integrated with an acid-containing, zeolite-templated conductive carbon framework and evaluated for the electrocatalytic glycerol oxidation reaction under neutral conditions. This catalyst architecture enables acidic Al sites and Pt nanoclusters to coexist within a conductive three-dimensional carbon framework, overcoming the limited electrical conductivity that typically restricts the direct application of solid acid materials in electrocatalysis. The optimized PtAlYTC catalyst exhibited approximately 30-fold higher turnover frequency and a 17-fold higher reaction rate than its acid-site-free counterpart, while the product selectivity remained relatively unchanged, demonstrating that the acid sites primarily enhance catalytic activity rather than redirecting the reaction chemistry.

Combined experimental and theoretical analyses reveal that this enhancement originates from a cooperative interaction between the metal and acid sites. Acidic Al sites modify the electronic environment of neighboring Pt, facilitating charge transfer and stabilizing reaction intermediates, while oxygen sites associated with the Al-containing acidic environment provide favorable sites for hydrogen acceptance and promote dehydrogenation during glycerol oxidation. These effects lower the energetics of key reaction steps relative to Pt alone. Together, these results demonstrate that solid acid functionality, traditionally exploited in thermal heterogeneous catalysis, can serve as an additional catalyst-design parameter in electrocatalysis and provide a strategy for engineering the local chemical environment surrounding electrochemical active sites.