Urotropine-triggered multi-reactive sites in carbon nanotubes towards efficient electrochemical hydrogen peroxide synthesis

The production of hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2 ) by electrochemical oxygen reduction is a clean and convenient route. Here, we develop a universal urotropine (hexamethylenetetramine) modified carbon-based catalyst strategy. Both experimental results and theoretical calculations proved that the introduction of urotropine not only provides the isolating O 2 active sites to protect OOH* from being further split, but also excites carbon nanotube matrix to produce rich secondary O 2 active sites. More importantly, the end-on type of adsorption of O 2 on excited secondary reactive sites can be stabilized by the hydrogen bond effect, which greatly increases the productivity of H 2 O 2 . As a result, the urotropine (hexamethylenetetramine) modified commercial carbon nanotubes (denoted as H-CNTs) catalyst achieved 95% selectivity and 748 mmol·g catalyst ·h −1 yield of H 2 O 2 at 0.7 V vs . RHE. Therefore, this work provides a highly potential urotropine modification strategy towards efficient electrochemical H 2 O 2 synthesis.