Reduction of precious metal ions in aqueous solutions by contact-electro-catalysis

Contact-Electro-Catalysis is an emerging catalytic principle that takes advantage of exchanges of electrons occurring through contact electrification events at solid-liquid interfaces to initiate or drive the catalysis of redox reactions. In this publication, the authors have proven the ability of various polymer insulators to catalyze the reduction of a wide variety of metal ions in aqueous solution, in both aerobic and anaerobic conditions. This property of the dielectric polymers was employed to design a 1-step method to selectively extract gold from e-waste leachates. In anaerobic conditions, the rate of the reactions increase due to the absence of competition form oxygen for the electrons. The influence of metal ions in solution on the distance between O₂ and the polymer chain of polytetrafluoroethylene was evaluated, as well as the resulting adsorption energy. The effect of tacticity on the ability of polymers such as PP to perform the contact-electro-catalytic reduction of oxygen was also evaluated. The files in this repository contains the position of the atoms before and after relaxation in all cases that were used to conduct the calculations.