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Surface promotion of copper nanoparticles with alumina clusters derived from layered double hydroxide accelerates CO2 reduction to ethylene in membrane electrode assemblies

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Abstract

Electrochemical CO2 reduction has the vast potential to neutralize CO2 emission and valorizes this greenhouse gas into chemicals and fuels under mild conditions. Its commercial realization hinges on catalyst innovation as well as device engineering for enabling reactions at industrially relevant conditions. Copper has been widely examined for the selective production of multicarbon chemicals particularly ethylene, while there is still a substantial gap between the expected and the attainable. In this work, we report that the surface promotion of copper with alumina clusters is a viable strategy to enhance its electrocatalytic performance. AlOx-promoted Cu catalyst is derived from Cu-Al layered double hydroxide nanosheets after alkali etching and cathodic conversion. It can catalyze CO2 to ethylene and multicarbon products with great selectivity and stability far superior to pristine copper in both an H-cell and a zero-gap membrane electrode assembly (MEA) electrolyzer. The surface promotion effect is understood via computational simulations showing that alumina clusters can stabilize key reaction intermediates (*COOH and *OCCOH) along the reaction pathway.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. U2002213 and 52161160331), the Science and Technology Development Fund Macau SAR (No. 0077/2021/A2), the Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, the 111 Project and Joint International Research Laboratory of Carbon-Based Functional Materials and Devices.

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  1. Jie Zhang, Xinnan Mao, and Binbin Pan contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Functional Nano and Soft Materials (FUNSOM), Soochow University, Suzhou, 215123, China

    Jie Zhang, Xinnan Mao, Binbin Pan, Jie Xu, Xue Ding, Na Han, Lu Wang, Yuhang Wang & Yanguang Li

  2. Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Advanced Negative Carbon Technologies, Soochow University, Suzhou, 215123, China

    Jie Zhang, Xinnan Mao, Binbin Pan, Jie Xu, Xue Ding, Na Han, Lu Wang, Yuhang Wang & Yanguang Li

  3. Macao Institute of Materials Science and Engineering (MIMSE), MUST-SUDA Joint Research Center for Advanced Functional Materials, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macao, 999078, China

    Yanguang Li

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  1. Jie Zhang
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Correspondence to Lu Wang, Yuhang Wang or Yanguang Li.

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Surface promotion of copper nanoparticles with alumina clusters derived from layered double hydroxide accelerates CO2 reduction to ethylene in membrane electrode assemblies

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Zhang, J., Mao, X., Pan, B. et al. Surface promotion of copper nanoparticles with alumina clusters derived from layered double hydroxide accelerates CO2 reduction to ethylene in membrane electrode assemblies. Nano Res. 16, 4685–4690 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-5128-2

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