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Self-powered electrochemical system by combining Fenton reaction and active chlorine generation for organic contaminant treatment

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Abstract

Environmental deterioration, especially water pollution, is widely dispersed and could affect the quality of people’s life at large. Though the sewage treatment plants are constructed to meet the demands of cities, distributed treatment units are still in request for the supplementary of centralized purification beyond the range of plants. Electrochemical degradation can reduce organic pollution to some degree, but it has to be powered. Triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is a newly-invented technology for low-frequency mechanical energy harvesting. Here, by integrating a rotary TENG (R-TENG) as electric power source with an electrochemical cell containing a modified graphite felt cathode for hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) along with hydroxyl radical (•OH) generation by Fenton reaction and a platinum sheet anode for active chlorine generation, a self-powered electrochemical system (SPECS) was constructed. Under the driven of mechanical energy or wind flow, such SPECS can efficiently degrade dyes after power management in neutral condition without any O2 aeration. This work not only provides a guideline for optimizing self-powered electrochemical reaction, but also displays a strategy based on the conversion from distributed mechanical energy to chemical energy for environmental remediation.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Technology R&D Program of China (No. 2016YFA0202704), Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission (Nos. Z171100000317001, Z171100002017017, and Y3993113DF), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51432005, 5151101243, 51561145021, and 21761142011).

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Author notes

  1. Yawei Feng, Kai Han, and Tao Jiang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, Beijing Key Laboratory of Micro-nano Energy and Sensor, Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100083, China

    Yawei Feng, Kai Han, Tao Jiang, Xi Liang, Xia Cao & Zhong Lin Wang

  2. School of Nanoscience and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Yawei Feng, Kai Han, Tao Jiang, Xi Liang, Xia Cao & Zhong Lin Wang

  3. Education Ministry Key and International Joint Lab of Resource Chemistry and Shanghai Key Lab of Rare Earth Functional Materials, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, 200234, China

    Zhenfeng Bian

  4. School of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai University of Electric Power, Shanghai, 200090, China

    Hexing Li

  5. School of Material Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA

    Zhong Lin Wang

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  1. Yawei Feng
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Correspondence to Xia Cao, Hexing Li or Zhong Lin Wang.

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Self-powered electrochemical system by combining Fenton reaction and active chlorine generation for organic contaminant treatment

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Feng, Y., Han, K., Jiang, T. et al. Self-powered electrochemical system by combining Fenton reaction and active chlorine generation for organic contaminant treatment. Nano Res. 12, 2729–2735 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-019-2506-5

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