Trimetallic PdCuIr with long-spined sea-urchin-like morphology for ambient electroreduction of nitrogen to ammonia

Shape-controlled fabrication of metallic nanostructures is vital for the development of highly efficient catalysts for electrochemical synthesis of ammonia. Herein, we present a facile one-pot reduction method for the fabrication of trimetallic PdCuIr with long-spined sea-urchin-like morphology (PdCuIr-LS) in an aqueous solution. The PdCuIr-LS assembled with nanothorns as building blocks possesses highly branched and self-supported nanostructures. Benefiting from its hyperbranched structure and trimetallic composition, the PdCuIr-LS exhibits superior catalytic activity for the nitrogen reduction reaction with a high NH3 yield (13.43 μg h−1 mgcat.−1) and faradaic efficiency (5.29%) in 0.1 M Na2SO4. Compared with the traditional multistep approaches, the proposed one-pot synthetic route is more facile to prepare multimetallic Pd-based catalysts with highly branched morphology and desired compositions for electrocatalytic nitrogen reduction to ammonia.