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

Pengtang Wang¹ , Man Qiao², Qi Shao¹ , Yecan Pi¹ , Xing Zhu³, Yafei Li²& Xiaoqing Huang^{1, *}（黄小青）

¹ College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Soochow University, 215123 Jiangsu, China.

² Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Centre of Biomedical Functional Materials, School of Chemistry and Materials Science, Nanjing Normal University, 210023 Nanjing, China.

³ Testing & Analysis Center, Soochow University, 215123 Jiangsu, China.

These authors contributed equally: Pengtang Wang, Man Qiao

NATURE COMMUNICATIONS， (2018) 9:4933

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_RHEto −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 CO₂reduction and beyond.

链接：https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07419-z