Selective, Stable Production of Ethylene Using a Pulsed Cu-Based Electrode

Ethylene (C2H4) is an important product in carbon dioxide electroreduction (CO2RR) because of the essential role it plays in chemical industry. While several strategies have been proposed to tune the selectivity of Cu-based catalysts in order to achieve high C2H4 faradaic efficiency, maintaining high selectivity toward C2H4 in CO2RR remains an unresolved problem hampering the deployment of CO2 conversion technology due to the lack of stable electrocatalysts. Here, we develop a facile method to deposit a layer of Cu2O on Cu foil by an electrochemical pulsed potential treatment. This method is capable to easily scale up and synthesize multiple electrodes in one step. After the synthesis, the pulsed copper foil, denoted as P-Cu, exhibits good C2H4 faradaic efficiency of ∼50% in CO2RR at a potential around −1.0 V vs. RHE. The C2H4 selectivity is also found to be quantitatively correlated with the roughness factor (RF) of Cu-based catalysts. More importantly, for the first time, we demonstrate that the P-Cu electrode is quite durable in CO2RR to produce C2H4 for more than 6 months.