Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.1038/s41598-025-32621-7

Publication Title

Scientific Reports

Volume

16

Pages

2780 (1-10)

Abstract

The electrochemical conversion of biomass-derived 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) represents a promising, economically viable, and environmentally sustainable approach for producing value-added chemicals using renewable energy and in situ hydrogen generated through water electrolysis. However, the electrochemical hydrogenation (ECH) of HMF remains challenging due to the inherently low catalytic activity and selectivity of the electrodes, compounded by competition with the kinetically favored hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in aqueous electrolytes. In this work, we demonstrate that CuxNi100-x heteroatomic thin films, fabricated via direct current (DC) magnetron co-sputtering, achieve a more than one order of magnitude increase in the HMF to 2,5-Bis-hydroxymethylfuran (BHMF) conversion rate, with nearly 50% faradic efficiency (FE) for BHMF, when compared to pure Cu and Ni electrodes (~ 10% BHMF FE). Our results suggest that the synergistic interaction between Cu and Ni creates an optimal catalytic environment for both HMF and adsorbed hydrogen (Hads) species, thereby enhancing BHMF formation through the ECH pathway.

Rights

© The Authors 2025

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

Article states: "The data sets used and/or analyzed during the current study available from the corresponding author on reasonable request."

Original Publication Citation

Dikshit, M., Muchharla, B., Rivera, L. V., Kumar, K., Sanwaria, S., Sadasivuni, K. K., Karoui, A., Kumar, S., Adedeji, A., & Kumar, B. (2026). Co-sputtered CuNi heteroatomic electrocatalyst for enhanced 5-hydroxymethylfurfural selective electrochemical conversion. Scientific Reports, 16, 1-10, Article 2780. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-32621-7

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