@article{4594796018194a5c9d8364dc193c23e7,
title = "Constraining CO coverage on copper promotes high-efficiency ethylene electroproduction",
abstract = "The availability of inexpensive industrial CO gas streams motivates efficient electrocatalytic upgrading of CO to higher-value feedstocks such as ethylene. However, the electrosynthesis of ethylene by the CO reduction reaction (CORR) has suffered from low selectivity and energy efficiency. Here we find that the recent strategy of increasing performance through use of highly alkaline electrolyte—which is very effective in CO2RR—fails in CORR and drives the reaction to acetate. We then observe that ethylene selectivity increases when we constrain (decrease) CO availability. Using density functional theory, we show how CO coverage on copper influences the reaction pathways of ethylene versus oxygenate: lower CO coverage stabilizes the ethylene-relevant intermediates whereas higher CO coverage favours oxygenate formation. We then control local CO availability experimentally by tuning the CO concentration and reaction rate; we achieve ethylene Faradaic efficiencies of 72% and a partial current density of >800 mA cm−2. The overall system provides a half-cell energy efficiency of 44% for ethylene production.",
author = "Jun Li and Ziyun Wang and Christopher McCallum and Yi Xu and Fengwang Li and Yuhang Wang and Gabardo, {Christine M.} and Dinh, {Cao Thang} and Zhuang, {Tao Tao} and Liang Wang and Howe, {Jane Y.} and Yang Ren and Sargent, {Edward H.} and David Sinton",
note = "Funding Information: This work was supported financially by the Ontario Research Fund: Research Excellence programme, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the CIFAR Bio-inspired Solar Energy programme and the University of Toronto Connaught grant. This research used synchrotron resources of the APS, an Office of Science user facility that is operated for the US Department of Energy Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory and was supported by the US Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC02-06CH11357, as well as the Canadian Light Source and its funding partners. This research also used infrastructure provided by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Research Fund. The authors thank T.P. Wu, Y.Z. Finfrock and L. Ma for technical support at the 9BM beamline of APS. D.S. acknowledges the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council E.W.R Steacie Memorial Fellowship. J.L. acknowledges the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships programme. C.M.G. acknowledges the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowships programme. All of the DFT computations were performed on the IBM BlueGene/Q supercomputer with support from the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform and Niagara supercomputer at the SciNet HPC Consortium. The Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform is funded by the Federal Economic Development Agency of Southern Ontario, the Province of Ontario, IBM Canada Ltd., Ontario Centres of Excellence, Mitacs and 15 Ontario academic member institutions. SciNet is funded by: the Canada Foundation for Innovation; the Government of Ontario; Ontario Research Fund - Research Excellence; and the University of Toronto. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.",
year = "2019",
month = dec,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1038/s41929-019-0380-x",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "2",
pages = "1124--1131",
journal = "Nature Catalysis",
issn = "2520-1158",
publisher = "Nature Publishing Group",
number = "12",
}
