Researchers Design a Novel Copper Gas Penetration Electrode to Efficiently Reduce CO2 to Multicarbon Products----Shanghai Advanced Research Institute,Chinese Academy of Sciences

Newsroom

Research Progress

Home > Newsroom > Research Progress

Researchers Design a Novel Copper Gas Penetration Electrode to Efficiently Reduce CO2 to Multicarbon Products

date： 2022-11-08

Electrochemical conversion of CO₂ into value-added chemical fuels driven by renewable electrical energy has twofold roles in reducing net CO₂ emission and in addressing energy consumption.

Although considerable progress has been made in CO₂ electroreduction, the current density of CO₂ to multicarbon products remains a challenge for sustained industrial-scale implementation. Therefore, it is crucial to develop efficient electrodes with high C₂₊ yield at high current density.

Motivated by this challenge, a research team from the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported a hierarchical micro/nanostructured Cu(100)-rich hollow-fiber gas penetration electrode (GPE), breaking through the bottleneck of low CO₂ solubility limit and realizing electrochemical reduction of CO₂ to multicarbon products under ampere level current density.

The results were published in Energy & Environmental Science on November 2.

The Cu GPEs composed only of metallic copper for electrochemical CO₂ reduction reaction to C₂₊ product, reducing CO₂ to C₂₊ product with a faradaic efficiency of 62.8% and a current density of 2.3 A cm^-2 in 0.5 M KHCO₃ solution at -1.94 V, approximating to or even outperforming state-of-the-art Cu-based catalysts.

Electrochemical results show that optimized mass transfer and enhanced three-phase interface reaction synergistically promote CO₂ activation and reduction kinetics. Theoretical calculations further suggest that the Cu(100) facet of Cu GPE favors CO adsorption and dimerization, thus enhancing its catalytic activity.

This work represents an encouraging headway in the design and development of new electrode configurations to realize CO₂ electroreduction to high-value C₂₊ chemicals with scalable applications.

Schematic diagram and electrocatalytic performance of efficient CO₂ reduction over copper

hollow fiber gas penetration electrode (image by SARI)