Three-birds-with-one-stone electrolysis for energy-efficiency production of gluconate and hydrogen.

• A tri-profitable electrochemical cell for energy saving, hydrogen production, gluconate production. • Bifunctional high-activity electrocatalyst of Fe 0.1 -CoSe 2. • Acidic hydrogen evolution and alkaline glucose oxidation. • Electrochemical neutralization energy assisted aqueous electrochemical system. Electrolytic synthesis shows great promise to address the pressing environmental and energy issues by synergy with the ever increasing renewable energy. In this article, we report a tri-profitable alkaline-acidic asymmetric electrolytic cell (3A-EC) by coupling glucose oxidation reaction (GOR) in alkaline anode with hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in acidic cathode. We design and fabricate bifunctional electrode with iron doped cobalt diselenide nanowires on conductive carbon cloth (Fe 0.1 -CoSe 2 /CC), which shows highly attractive electrocatalytic activity and stability for GOR in alkali and HER in acid, respectively. The as-built 3A-EC only requires an applied voltage of 0.72 V to achieve an electrolytic current density of 10 mA cm−2 for H 2 and gluconate generation, thanks to successfully harvesting electrochemical energy from both glucose oxidation and neutralization. The present work presents an innovative strategy of killing three birds with one stone for saving energy and generating two value-added products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]