Cu2O-Ag Tandem Catalysts for Selective Electrochemical Reduction of CO2 to C2 Products

Di Niu; Cong Wei; Zheng Lu; Yanyan Fang; Bo Liu; Da Sun; Xiaobin Hao; Hongge Pan; Gongming Wang

doi:10.3390/molecules26082175

Cu₂O-Ag Tandem Catalysts for Selective Electrochemical Reduction of CO₂ to C₂ Products

Molecules. 2021 Apr 9;26(8):2175. doi: 10.3390/molecules26082175.

Authors

Di Niu¹, Cong Wei¹, Zheng Lu¹, Yanyan Fang¹, Bo Liu¹, Da Sun¹, Xiaobin Hao¹, Hongge Pan^{2

3}, Gongming Wang¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Applied Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China.
² Institute of Science and Technology for New Energy, Xi'an Technological University, Xi'an 710021, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.

Abstract

The electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction reaction (CO₂RR) to C₂ chemicals has received great attention. Here, we report the cuprous oxide (Cu₂O) nanocubes cooperated with silver (Ag) nanoparticles via the replacement reaction for a synergetic CO₂RR. The Cu₂O-Ag tandem catalyst exhibits an impressive Faradaic efficiency (FE) of 72.85% for C₂ products with a partial current density of 243.32 mA·cm^-2. The electrochemical experiments and density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the introduction of Ag improves the intermediate CO concentration on the catalyst surface and meanwhile reduces the C-C coupling reaction barrier energy, which is favorable for the synthesis of C₂ products.

Keywords: C2 products; carbon dioxide reduction; cuprous oxide; silver; tandem catalyst.

Abstract

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