Volume 1, 2023

Local hydrophobicity allows high-performance electrochemical carbon monoxide reduction to C2+ products

Abstract

While CO can already be produced at industrially relevant current densities via CO2 electrolysis, the selective formation of C2+ products seems challenging. CO electrolysis, in principle, can overcome this barrier, hence forming valuable chemicals from CO2 in two steps. Here we demonstrate that a mass-produced, commercially available polymeric pore sealer can be used as a catalyst binder, ensuring high rate and selective CO reduction. We achieved above 70% faradaic efficiency for C2+ products formation at j = 500 mA cm−2 current density. As no specific interaction between the polymer and the CO reactant was found, we attribute the stable and selective operation of the electrolyzer cell to the controlled wetting of the catalyst layer due to the homogeneous polymer coating on the catalyst particles’ surface. These results indicate that sophistically designed surface modifiers are not necessarily required for CO electrolysis, but a simpler alternative can in some cases lead to the same reaction rate, selectivity and energy efficiency; hence the capital costs can be significantly decreased.

Graphical abstract: Local hydrophobicity allows high-performance electrochemical carbon monoxide reduction to C2+ products

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
13 Jan 2023
Accepted
04 Mar 2023
First published
13 Mar 2023
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

EES. Catal., 2023,1, 263-273

Local hydrophobicity allows high-performance electrochemical carbon monoxide reduction to C2+ products

A. Kormányos, B. Endrődi, Z. Zhang, A. Samu, L. Mérai, G. F. Samu, L. Janovák and C. Janáky, EES. Catal., 2023, 1, 263 DOI: 10.1039/D3EY00006K

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements