Morphological Attributes Govern Carbon Dioxide Reduction on N-Doped Carbon Electrodes

Dorottya Hursán; Angelika A Samu; László Janovák; Kateryna Artyushkova; Tristan Asset; Plamen Atanassov; Csaba Janáky

doi:10.1016/j.joule.2019.05.007

Morphological Attributes Govern Carbon Dioxide Reduction on N-Doped Carbon Electrodes

Joule. 2019 Jul 17;3(7):1719-1733. doi: 10.1016/j.joule.2019.05.007.

Authors

Dorottya Hursán^{1

2}, Angelika A Samu^{1

2}, László Janovák¹, Kateryna Artyushkova³, Tristan Asset^{3

4}, Plamen Atanassov^{3

4}, Csaba Janáky^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physical Chemistry and Materials Science, Interdisciplinary Excellence Centre, University of Szeged, Aradi sq. 1, Szeged 6720, Hungary.
² MTA-SZTE "Lendület" Photoelectrochemistry Research Group, Rerrich sq. 1, Szeged 6720, Hungary.
³ Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Center Micro-Engineered Materials, University of NewMexico Albuquerque, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA.
⁴ Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National Fuel Cell Research Center, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.

Abstract

The morphology of electrode materials is often overlooked when comparing different carbon-based electrocatalysts for carbon dioxide reduction. To investigate the role of morphological attributes, we studied polymer-derived, interconnected, N-doped carbon structures with uniformly sized meso or macropores, differing only in the pore size. We found that the carbon dioxide reduction selectivity (versus the hydrogen evolution reaction) increased around three times just by introducing the porosity into the carbon structure (with an optimal pore size of 27 nm). We attribute this change to alterations in the wetting and CO₂ adsorption properties of the carbon catalysts. These insights offer a new platform to advance CO₂ reduction performance by only morphological engineering of the electrocatalyst.

Keywords: CO2 reduction; electrocatalyst; energy conversion; morphological engineering; solar fuels.