High-Selectivity Electrochemical Conversion of CO2 to Ethanol using a Copper Nanoparticle/N-Doped Graphene Electrode
By Yang Song, R. Peng, D. Hensley, P. Bonnesen, L. Liang, Zili Wu, H. Meyer, M. Chi, Cheng Ma, Bobby G. Sumpter and 1 more. 2016
310 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Though carbon dioxide is a waste product of combustion, it can also be a potential feedstock for the production of fine and commodity organic chemicals provided that an efficient means to convert it to useful organic synthons can be developed. Herein we report a common element, nanostructured catalyst for the direct electrochemical conversion of CO2 to ethanol with high Faradaic efficiency (63 % at −1.2 V vs RHE) and high selectivity (84 %) that operates in water and at ambient temperature and pressure. Lacking noble metals or other rare or expensive materials, the catalyst is comprised of Cu nanoparticles on a highly textured, N-doped carbon nanospike film. Electrochemical analysis and density functional theory (DFT) calculations suggest a preliminary mechanism in which active sites on the Cu nanoparticles and the carbon nanospikes work in tandem to control the electrochemical reduction of carbon monoxide dimer to alcohol.
Subfields: Catalysis, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3fd7e96dd927dc75be52461f741569bd3617ad22
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In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- Electrochemical CO2 Reduction to Ethanol with Copper-Based Catalysts (2021, methodology): “developed a nanoscale catalyst consisting of copper nanoparticles (CuNP) deposited on a N-doped graphene-like carbon nanospike (CNS) film.(38) CNS was grown on Si wafers through plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) in the presence of ammonia (NH3) at 650°C for 30 min.”
- General Techno-Economic Analysis of CO2 Electrolysis Systems (2018, unknown): “However, in 2016, significant strides have been made on improving the Faradaic efficiency for C 2 products, achieving as high as 41% and 63% for ethylene and ethanol, respectively.”
- Electrocatalytic carbon dioxide reduction: from fundamental principles to catalyst design (2020, background): “Of the various C2þ products formed on Cu, alcohols are highly desirable due to their high energy densities and ease of storage and transportation as liquids [194,195].”