Effect of the coordination environment of Cu in Cu2O on the electroreduction of CO2 to ethylene

Abstract

Cuprous oxide catalysts have attracted much attention because they exhibited high selectivity of C2+ products in CO₂ electroreduction, but the effect of the structure of catalysts on the reaction needs to be studied further. Herein, we studied the effect of the coordination number (CN) of Cu–Cu and Cu–O in Cu₂O on the catalytic performance of CO₂ electrocatalytic reduction to C₂H₄. It was demonstrated that Cu–Cu CN and Cu–O CN, which could be tuned by changing the crystal surface and size of Cu₂O, influenced the current density and faradaic efficiency (FE) of C₂H₄ significantly. At suitable CNs, the FE of C₂H₄ could reach 50.6% with a current density of 24.5 mA cm⁻².