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Journal ArticleDOI

CO2 electroreduction to ethylene via hydroxide-mediated copper catalysis at an abrupt interface

TL;DR: A copper electrocatalyst at an abrupt reaction interface in an alkaline electrolyte reduces CO2 to ethylene with 70% faradaic efficiency at a potential of −0.55 volts versus a reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE).
Abstract: Carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) electroreduction could provide a useful source of ethylene, but low conversion efficiency, low production rates, and low catalyst stability limit current systems. Here we report that a copper electrocatalyst at an abrupt reaction interface in an alkaline electrolyte reduces CO 2 to ethylene with 70% faradaic efficiency at a potential of −0.55 volts versus a reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE). Hydroxide ions on or near the copper surface lower the CO 2 reduction and carbon monoxide (CO)–CO coupling activation energy barriers; as a result, onset of ethylene evolution at −0.165 volts versus an RHE in 10 molar potassium hydroxide occurs almost simultaneously with CO production. Operational stability was enhanced via the introduction of a polymer-based gas diffusion layer that sandwiches the reaction interface between separate hydrophobic and conductive supports, providing constant ethylene selectivity for an initial 150 operating hours.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate how key CO reduction reaction intermediates are stabilized in different electrolytes and at different pH values, and find that the catalytic trends previously observed experimentally can be explained by the interplay between the metal surface and the electrolyte.
Abstract: Electrochemical CO reduction holds the promise to be a cornerstone for sustainable production of fuels and chemicals. However, the underlying understanding of the carbon–carbon coupling toward multiple-carbon products is not complete. Here we present thermodynamically realistic structures of the electrochemical interfaces, determined by explicit ab initio simulations. We investigate how key CO reduction reaction intermediates are stabilized in different electrolytes and at different pH values. We find that the catalytic trends previously observed experimentally can be explained by the interplay between the metal surface and the electrolyte. For the Cu(100) facet with a phosphate buffer electrolyte, the energy efficiency is found to be limited by blocking of a phosphate anion, while in alkali hydroxide solutions (MOH, M = Na, K, Cs), OH* intermediates may be present, and at high overpotential the H* coverage limits the reaction. The results provide insight into the electrochemical interface structure, reve...

98 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Despite being desirable high-value products of the electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR), alcohols are still obtained with lower selectivity compared to hydrocarbons and the reaction pathw...
Abstract: Despite being desirable high-value products of the electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR), alcohols are still obtained with lower selectivity compared to hydrocarbons and the reaction pathw...

97 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, double sulfur vacancies formed on hexagonal copper sulfide can feature as efficient electrocatalytic centers for stabilizing both CO* and OCCO* dimer, and further CO-OCCO coupling to form C3 species, which cannot be realized on CuS with single or no sulfur vacancies.
Abstract: Electrochemical CO2 reduction can produce valuable products with high energy densities but the process is plagued by poor selectivities and low yields. Propanol represents a challenging product to obtain due to the complicated C3 forming mechanism that requires both stabilization of *C2 intermediates and subsequent C1–C2 coupling. Herein, density function theory calculations revealed that double sulfur vacancies formed on hexagonal copper sulfide can feature as efficient electrocatalytic centers for stabilizing both CO* and OCCO* dimer, and further CO–OCCO coupling to form C3 species, which cannot be realized on CuS with single or no sulfur vacancies. The double sulfur vacancies were then experimentally synthesized by an electrochemical lithium tuning strategy, during which the density of sulfur vacancies was well-tuned by the charge/discharge cycle number. The double sulfur vacancy-rich CuS catalyst exhibited a Faradaic efficiency toward n-propanol of 15.4 ± 1% at −1.05 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode in H-cells, and a high partial current density of 9.9 mA cm−2 at −0.85 V in flow-cells, comparable to the best reported electrochemical CO2 reduction toward n-propanol. Our work suggests an attractive approach to create anion vacancy pairs as catalytic centers for multi-carbon-products. Electrochemical CO2 reduction to the valuable n-propanol is challenging due to the complicated C3 forming mechanism. Here, authors demonstrate double sulfur vacancies formed on hexagonal copper sulfide can serve as efficient electrocatalytic centers.

97 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Abstract: The carbon dioxide reduction reaction (CO2RR) presents the opportunity to consume CO2 and produce desirable products. However, the alkaline conditions required for productive CO2RR result in the bulk of input CO2 being lost to bicarbonate and carbonate. This loss imposes a 25% limit on the conversion of CO2 to multicarbon (C2+) products for systems that use anions as the charge carrierand overcoming this limit is a challenge of singular importance to the field. Here, we find that cation exchange membranes (CEMs) do not provide the required locally alkaline conditions, and bipolar membranes (BPMs) are unstable, delaminating at the membrane−membrane interface. We develop a permeable CO2 regeneration layer (PCRL) that provides an alkaline environment at the CO2RR catalyst surface and enables local CO2 regeneration. With the PCRL strategy, CO2 crossover is limited to 15% of the amount of CO2 converted into products, in all cases. Low crossover and low flow rate combine to enable a single pass CO2 conversion of 85% (at 100 mA/cm ), with a C2+ faradaic efficiency and full cell voltage comparable to the anion-conducting membrane electrode assembly. The electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) presents an opportunity to utilize renewable electricity to produce chemical fuels and feedstocks from CO2. Valuable multicarbon (C2+) products, such as ethylene (C2H4) and ethanol (C2H5OH), are of particular interest in view of large existing markets. Providing reactant CO2 gas directly to the catalyst sites with gas diffusion electrodes (GDEs) enables CO2RR systems to attain impressive reaction rates (≫ 100 mA/cm2). Membrane electrode assembly cells combine GDEs and membranes in a zero-gap fashion. This configuration mitigates electrolyte degradation and salt precipitation issues characteristic of alkaline flow cells. Alkaline conditions are required at the cathode to suppress the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and enable a high faradaic efficiency (FE) toward CO2RR products. 11,12 Locally, alkaline conditions are maintained during CO2RR by hydroxide anions produced at the catalyst layer (eqs 1 and 2). However, these conditions result in the competing reaction of CO2 with hydroxide forming bicarbonate and carbonate (eqs 3 and 4). These ions electromigrate through the anion exchange membrane (AEM) to the anode where they combine with protons generated by the anodic oxygen evolution reaction to form CO2 and water. 13 Here, the CO2 bubbles out of the locally acidic anolyte and combines with produced oxygen, rendering a gas mixture that is costly to separate. This crossover of CO2 in MEA systems results in a low single pass conversion for CO2RR. When carbonate is the dominant charge carrier through the AEM, CO2 conversion efficiency is limited to 50% in the production of CO. + + → + − − CO H O 2e CO 2OH 2 2 (1) + + → + − − 2CO 8H O 12e C H 12OH 2 2 2 4 (2) + → − − CO OH HCO 2 3 (3) + → + − − CO 2OH CO H O 2 3 2 2 (4) Received: June 1, 2021 Accepted: July 23, 2021 Leter http://pubs.acs.org/journal/aelccp © XXXX American Chemical Society 2952 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.1c01122 ACS Energy Lett. 2021, 6, 2952−2959 D ow nl oa de d vi a U N IV O F T O R O N T O o n A ug us t 3 , 2 02 1 at 1 2: 51 :0 1 (U T C ). Se e ht tp s: //p ub s. ac s. or g/ sh ar in gg ui de lin es f or o pt io ns o n ho w to le gi tim at el y sh ar e pu bl is he d ar tic le s.

96 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the atomic In catalysts were anchored on N-doped carbon (InA/NC) through pyrolysis of In-based metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and dicyandiamide.
Abstract: Electrochemical reduction of CO2 to chemicals and fuels is an interesting and attractive way to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and energy shortages. In this work, we report the use of atomic In catalysts for CO2 electroreduction to CO. The atomic In catalysts were anchored on N-doped carbon (InA/NC) through pyrolysis of In-based metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and dicyandiamide. It was discovered that InA/NC had outstanding performance for selective CO production in the mixed electrolyte of ionic liquid/MeCN. It is different from those common In-based materials, in which formate/formic acid is formed as the main product. The faradaic efficiency (FE) of CO and total current density were 97.2% and 39.4 mA cm-2, respectively, with a turnover frequency (TOF) of ∼40 000 h-1. It is one of the highest TOF for CO production to date for all of the catalysts reported. In addition, the catalyst had remarkable stability. Detailed study indicated that InA/NC had higher double-layer capacitance, larger CO2 adsorption capacity, and lower interfacial charge transfer resistance, leading to high activity for CO2 reduction. Control experiments and theoretical calculations showed that the In-N site of InA/NC is not only beneficial for dissociation of COOH* to form CO but also hinders formate formation, leading to high selectivity toward CO instead of formate.

96 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A simple derivation of a simple GGA is presented, in which all parameters (other than those in LSD) are fundamental constants, and only general features of the detailed construction underlying the Perdew-Wang 1991 (PW91) GGA are invoked.
Abstract: Generalized gradient approximations (GGA’s) for the exchange-correlation energy improve upon the local spin density (LSD) description of atoms, molecules, and solids. We present a simple derivation of a simple GGA, in which all parameters (other than those in LSD) are fundamental constants. Only general features of the detailed construction underlying the Perdew-Wang 1991 (PW91) GGA are invoked. Improvements over PW91 include an accurate description of the linear response of the uniform electron gas, correct behavior under uniform scaling, and a smoother potential. [S0031-9007(96)01479-2] PACS numbers: 71.15.Mb, 71.45.Gm Kohn-Sham density functional theory [1,2] is widely used for self-consistent-field electronic structure calculations of the ground-state properties of atoms, molecules, and solids. In this theory, only the exchange-correlation energy EXC › EX 1 EC as a functional of the electron spin densities n"srd and n#srd must be approximated. The most popular functionals have a form appropriate for slowly varying densities: the local spin density (LSD) approximation Z d 3 rn e unif

146,533 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: An efficient scheme for calculating the Kohn-Sham ground state of metallic systems using pseudopotentials and a plane-wave basis set is presented and the application of Pulay's DIIS method to the iterative diagonalization of large matrices will be discussed.
Abstract: We present an efficient scheme for calculating the Kohn-Sham ground state of metallic systems using pseudopotentials and a plane-wave basis set. In the first part the application of Pulay's DIIS method (direct inversion in the iterative subspace) to the iterative diagonalization of large matrices will be discussed. Our approach is stable, reliable, and minimizes the number of order ${\mathit{N}}_{\mathrm{atoms}}^{3}$ operations. In the second part, we will discuss an efficient mixing scheme also based on Pulay's scheme. A special ``metric'' and a special ``preconditioning'' optimized for a plane-wave basis set will be introduced. Scaling of the method will be discussed in detail for non-self-consistent and self-consistent calculations. It will be shown that the number of iterations required to obtain a specific precision is almost independent of the system size. Altogether an order ${\mathit{N}}_{\mathrm{atoms}}^{2}$ scaling is found for systems containing up to 1000 electrons. If we take into account that the number of k points can be decreased linearly with the system size, the overall scaling can approach ${\mathit{N}}_{\mathrm{atoms}}$. We have implemented these algorithms within a powerful package called VASP (Vienna ab initio simulation package). The program and the techniques have been used successfully for a large number of different systems (liquid and amorphous semiconductors, liquid simple and transition metals, metallic and semiconducting surfaces, phonons in simple metals, transition metals, and semiconductors) and turned out to be very reliable. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.

81,985 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the formal relationship between US Vanderbilt-type pseudopotentials and Blochl's projector augmented wave (PAW) method is derived and the Hamilton operator, the forces, and the stress tensor are derived for this modified PAW functional.
Abstract: The formal relationship between ultrasoft (US) Vanderbilt-type pseudopotentials and Bl\"ochl's projector augmented wave (PAW) method is derived. It is shown that the total energy functional for US pseudopotentials can be obtained by linearization of two terms in a slightly modified PAW total energy functional. The Hamilton operator, the forces, and the stress tensor are derived for this modified PAW functional. A simple way to implement the PAW method in existing plane-wave codes supporting US pseudopotentials is pointed out. In addition, critical tests are presented to compare the accuracy and efficiency of the PAW and the US pseudopotential method with relaxed core all electron methods. These tests include small molecules $({\mathrm{H}}_{2}{,\mathrm{}\mathrm{H}}_{2}{\mathrm{O},\mathrm{}\mathrm{Li}}_{2}{,\mathrm{}\mathrm{N}}_{2}{,\mathrm{}\mathrm{F}}_{2}{,\mathrm{}\mathrm{BF}}_{3}{,\mathrm{}\mathrm{SiF}}_{4})$ and several bulk systems (diamond, Si, V, Li, Ca, ${\mathrm{CaF}}_{2},$ Fe, Co, Ni). Particular attention is paid to the bulk properties and magnetic energies of Fe, Co, and Ni.

57,691 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: An improved way of estimating the local tangent in the nudged elastic band method for finding minimum energy paths is presented, and examples given where a complementary method, the dimer method, is used to efficiently converge to the saddle point.
Abstract: An improved way of estimating the local tangent in the nudged elastic band method for finding minimum energy paths is presented. In systems where the force along the minimum energy path is large compared to the restoring force perpendicular to the path and when many images of the system are included in the elastic band, kinks can develop and prevent the band from converging to the minimum energy path. We show how the kinks arise and present an improved way of estimating the local tangent which solves the problem. The task of finding an accurate energy and configuration for the saddle point is also discussed and examples given where a complementary method, the dimer method, is used to efficiently converge to the saddle point. Both methods only require the first derivative of the energy and can, therefore, easily be applied in plane wave based density-functional theory calculations. Examples are given from studies of the exchange diffusion mechanism in a Si crystal, Al addimer formation on the Al(100) surfa...

6,825 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper describes how accurate off-lattice ascent paths can be represented with respect to the grid points, and maintains the efficient linear scaling of an earlier version of the algorithm, and eliminates a tendency for the Bader surfaces to be aligned along the grid directions.
Abstract: A computational method for partitioning a charge density grid into Bader volumes is presented which is efficient, robust, and scales linearly with the number of grid points. The partitioning algorithm follows the steepest ascent paths along the charge density gradient from grid point to grid point until a charge density maximum is reached. In this paper, we describe how accurate off-lattice ascent paths can be represented with respect to the grid points. This improvement maintains the efficient linear scaling of an earlier version of the algorithm, and eliminates a tendency for the Bader surfaces to be aligned along the grid directions. As the algorithm assigns grid points to charge density maxima, subsequent paths are terminated when they reach previously assigned grid points. It is this grid-based approach which gives the algorithm its efficiency, and allows for the analysis of the large grids generated from plane-wave-based density functional theory calculations.

5,417 citations