POTSDAM -- Yang Yang, an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Clarkson University, and his co-authors recently won the 2021 American Chemical Society’s ES&T Engineering Journal’s inaugural Best Paper Award for his article “Electrosynthesis of > 20 g/L H2O2 from Air”. The article was published in ACS ES&T Engineering in 2021.

The winners of the 2021 Best Paper Award will be formally announced in an editorial in the September 2022 issue of ACS ES&T Engineering and on the front cover of the journal, published on Sept. 9, 2022.

Electrosynthesis of H2O2 from oxygen has attracted long-lasting attention in the past decades. H2O2 is an effective disinfectant and reagent in various water treatment processes. In the past, the synthesis of high concentration H2O2 requires noble metal catalyst (Pd), pure oxygen, and forced gas purging. In this study, Yang’s team designed a novel gas diffusion electrode that enables the synthesis of H2O2 at record high concentrations using carbon black as a catalyst and air as the oxygen source and eliminating the need of forced gas convection. This article has received 2500 downloads and views and four citations from other top-notch journals since its publication in Dec 2021. Graduate students Estefanny Quispe-Cardenas and Huihui Li (visiting student in Yang’s Lab at the moment) are the co-first authors of this article. This research is supported by the Clarkson COVID19 special research fund.

“This is one of my proudest works, as we manage to provide new thinking to the field,” says Yang. “In the past, considerable research has been focusing on the development of novel catalyst. Our work proves that the rationale design of solid/liquid catalytic interface is, if not more, equally important as the catalyst development.” “We use the simplest catalyst, carbon black, to achieve higher efficiency than Pd catalysts used in peer studies. I guess this is a good example of “defying convention,” Yang said.