Dealloying-Derived Nanoporous Bismuth for Selective CO2 Electroreduction to Formate

Qingru Wei; Jingyu Qin; Guixing Jia; Yong Zhao; Zhiyuan Guo; Guanhua Cheng; Wensheng Ma; Wanfeng Yang; Zhonghua Zhang

doi:10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c02570

Dealloying-Derived Nanoporous Bismuth for Selective CO₂ Electroreduction to Formate

J Phys Chem Lett. 2022 Oct 6;13(39):9058-9065. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c02570. Epub 2022 Sep 26.

Authors

Qingru Wei¹, Jingyu Qin¹, Guixing Jia¹, Yong Zhao², Zhiyuan Guo¹, Guanhua Cheng¹, Wensheng Ma¹, Wanfeng Yang¹, Zhonghua Zhang¹

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory for Liquid-Solid Structural Evolution and Processing of Materials (Ministry of Education), School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jingshi Road 17923, Jinan 250061, P. R. China.
² Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 3G8, Canada.

PMID: 36154146
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c02570

Abstract

Electrochemical CO₂ reduction (CO₂ER) to formate is an attractive approach for CO₂ utilization. Here, we report a nanoporous bismuth (np-Bi) catalyst fabricated by chemically dealloying a rapidly solidified Mg₉₂Bi₈ alloy for CO₂ER. The np-Bi catalyst exhibits a three-dimensional interconnected ligament-channel network structure, which can efficiently convert CO₂ to formate with a selectivity of ≤94% and an activity of 62 mA cm^-2 in a wide potential range. Remarkably, the np-Bi catalyst delivers an industry-level current density of ∼500 mA cm^-2 for formate production at a low overpotential of 420 mV in the flow cell. The outstanding CO₂ER performance can be attributed to the enlarged surface area with abundant accessible active sites and highly curved surfaces with enhanced intrinsic activity. This work highlights the structural synergies for enhancing CO₂ER.