Whipped Cream Difficulties

This is my favorite recent scientific paper:

Will Any Crap We Put into Graphene Increase Its Electrocatalytic Effect?

That’s the actual title, of an actual paper (not an April Fool’s joke) published on January 14th, although it isn’t clear to me if it was peer reviewed or what other publication controls exist on the “ACS Publications” website.

I’m not a chemist, much less a graphene chemist, but I’ll try to summarize: Graphene (“an atomic-scale hexagonal lattice made of carbon atoms“) has interesting properties for catalyzing electrochemical reactions. The authors of this paper seem to feel that there’s been a recent trend of adding impurities (“doping”) graphine to see how it behaves, and discovering that pretty much anything scientists add increases the electrocatalytic properties of graphine. They also seem to feel that this trend has become absurd.

One may exaggerate only a little by saying that if we spit on graphene it becomes a better electrocatalyst.

But instead of whinging, they decided to prove a point, by doping graphene with…guano. Yes, bird crap. Thus the title.

Guano has a great advantage for doping over using synthetic chemicals. It is available at low cost, it contains a plethora of elements (including N, P, S, Cl, etc.), and its use for graphene doping can be handled by a nonchemist. We show that we can create high-entropy, multiple-element-doped graphene with outstanding electrocatalytic properties for two industrially important reactions: oxygen reduction used in fuel cells and hydrogen evolution used in electrolyzers.

I especially appreciate the author’s callback to Haber–Bosch: after all, the whole reason the Haber–Bosch process exists is because of an impending world-wide shortage of guano for fertilizer.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 7th, 2020 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Birds, Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.