Investigating the effect of designed copper-silver bimetallic electrocatalysts on the selectivity and reaction pathway of electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction reaction

The technique of electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction reaction (CO2RR) has been attracted wide attention due to converting main greenhouse gas to valuable chemicals. Among the numerous electrocatalysts, copper-based electrocatalyst is particular interest because it produces C1 products (carbon monoxide, methane and formate) as well as C2 products (ethanol and ethylene) which are not observed from other metal. However, the diversity of products also leads to low selectivity. The strategy to improve the selectivity is to introduce the second metal to tune the interaction of CO2, intermediates and products with the surface of electrocatalyst for enhancing or inhibiting certain catalytic pathways. The present literatures have been reported that the copper-silver bimetallic electrocatalyst system can improve the products selectivity and efficiency. Interestingly, it is found the products with improved selectivity are different under this system when the related reports are aggregated. This result reveals that that many important factors of the copper-silver bimetallic electrocatalyst still need to be clarified. The purpose of this project is to find out the key factor of copper-silver bimetallic system that dominates the selectivity of CO2RR by studying the dispersion density and particle size of copper nanoparticles on silver nanocubes and local pH gradient on the surface of electrode. Meanwhile, the designed flow-type electrolytic cell combined with in-situ spectroscopy measurements (XAS, XRD and Raman spectroscopies) will be implemented to comprehensively inspect the chemical state, electronic structure, coordination environment and the reaction pathway of copper-silver bimetallic electrocatalyst system under working conditions in order to accurately ascertain the relationship of structure-reaction pathway-product. The research results are expected to provide useful guidelines for designing high-efficient electrocatalysts in the future.

Project ID:PB10911-0097
External Project ID:MOST109-2222-E182-002-MY3