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.