Phase and structure engineering of copper tin heterostructures for efficient electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 9; no. 1; pp. 4933 - 10
• Main Authors: Wang, Pengtang, Qiao, Man, Shao, Qi, Pi, Yecan, Zhu, Xing, Li, Yafei, Huang, Xiaoqing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 22.11.2018; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 639/301/1023/1026; 639/4077/909; 639/638/161/886; 639/925/357/354; Carbon dioxide; Carbon monoxide; Catalysis; Catalysts; Copper; Copper oxides; Electrocatalysts; Electrochemistry; Electrolysis; Electrowinning; Engineering; Formic acid; Heterostructures; Humanities and Social Sciences; Interfaces; multidisciplinary; Reduction; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Tin; Tin dioxide
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07419-z

While engineering the phase and structure of electrocatalysts could regulate the performance of many typical electrochemical processes, its importance to the carbon dioxide electroreduction has been largely unexplored. Herein, a series of phase and structure engineered copper-tin dioxide catalysts have been created and thoroughly exploited for the carbon dioxide electroreduction to correlate performance with their unique structures and phases. The copper oxide/hollow tin dioxide heterostructure catalyst exhibits promising performance, which can tune the products from carbon monoxide to formic acid at high faradaic efficiency by simply changing the electrolysis potentials from −0.7 V RHE to −1.0 V RHE . The excellent performance is attributed to the abundant copper/tin dioxide interfaces involved in the copper oxide/hollow tin dioxide heterostructure during the electrochemical process, decreasing the reaction free-energies for the formation of COOH* species. Our work reported herein emphasizes the importance of phase and structure modulating of catalysts for enhancing electrochemical CO 2 reduction and beyond. While CO 2 removal will play a crucial role in limiting climate change, it is challenging to understand the factors that control materials’ selectivity to convert CO 2 to valuable products. Here, authors show copper and tin oxide interfaces to impact activities for CO 2 reduction products.