Surface and Interface Engineering in Copper-Based Bimetallic Materials for Selective CO2 Electroreduction

By Anthony Vasileff, Chaochen Xu, Y. Jiao, Yao Zheng, S. Qiao. Chem, 2018

694 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary The electrochemical CO 2 reduction reaction (CO 2 RR) can couple carbon-capture storage with renewable energy to convert CO 2 into chemical feedstocks. For this process, copper is the only metal known to catalyze the CO 2 RR to hydrocarbons with adequate efficiency, but it suffers from poor selectivity. Copper bimetallic materials have recently shown an improvement in CO 2 RR selectivity compared with that of copper, such that the secondary metal is likely to play an important role in altering inherent adsorption energetics. This review explores the fundamental role of the secondary metal with a focus on how oxygen (O) and hydrogen (H) affinity affect selectivity in bimetallic electrocatalysts. Here, we identify four metal groups categorized by O and H affinities to determine their CO 2 RR selectivity trends. By considering experimental and computational studies, we link the effects of extrinsic chemical composition and physical structure to intrinsic intermediate adsorption and reaction pathway selection. After this, we summarize some general trends and propose design strategies for future electrocatalysts.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3ee6f0b6c9f70bcf795fa9fb0310753508406ca

Citations in the corpus

• Constructing FeN4/graphitic nitrogen atomic interface for high-efficiency electrochemical CO2 reduction over a broad potential window (2021, neutral): “Currently, Cu is the only metalbased catalyst capable of transforming CO2 into high-valued hydrocarbons with a substantial conversion.(3) However, Cu suffers from high overpotentials, low product selectivity, and other issues related tomass transport.”