October 15th (Thursday) Graduate Seminar / Professor Jin Kyung-seok

Electrochemical synthetic methods

Over several decades, electrochemistry has played an imperative role in synthetic chemistry. Starting from the Kolbe reaction, developed in 1848, a lot of effort has been devoted to synthesizing target products with the use of electrochemistry. However, although electrochemical organic synthesis can be driven with environmentally-friendly sources of electricity, only a small number of commodity chemicals have been produced via electrochemical reactions; namely, anthraquinone, some perfluorinated hydrocarbons (PFCs), and adiponitrile, a key intermediate for the polymer Nylon 6,6. Most research into these synthetic approaches is just at the laboratory or pilot scale. The fact that such minimal attention has been paid to the commercialization of these methods has been attributed to high energy costs due to the required large overpotential values and poor selectivity toward desired products. In this regard, our group will focus on addressing challenging electro-organic synthesis problems through engineering efficient catalysts and gaining a deeper understanding of reaction mechanisms on those catalysts. In this talk, I will present my previous studies about the electrosynthesis of small molecules by using various nano-catalysts. Topics of my talk are as follows: i) water splitting, ii) electro-organic synthesis, and iii) electrochemical neuromodulation.