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Electrochemical CO2 reduction has the vast potential to neutralize CO2 emission and valorizes this greenhouse gas into chemicals and fuels under mild conditions. Its commercial realization hinges on catalyst innovation as well as device engineering for enabling reactions at industrially relevant conditions. Copper has been widely examined for the selective production of multicarbon chemicals particularly ethylene, while there is still a substantial gap between the expected and the attainable. In this work, we report that the surface promotion of copper with alumina clusters is a viable strategy to enhance its electrocatalytic performance. AlOx-promoted Cu catalyst is derived from Cu-Al layered double hydroxide nanosheets after alkali etching and cathodic conversion. It can catalyze CO2 to ethylene and multicarbon products with great selectivity and stability far superior to pristine copper in both an H-cell and a zero-gap membrane electrode assembly (MEA) electrolyzer. The surface promotion effect is understood via computational simulations showing that alumina clusters can stabilize key reaction intermediates (*COOH and *OCCOH) along the reaction pathway.

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Publication history
Copyright
Acknowledgements

Publication history

Received: 23 August 2022
Revised: 26 September 2022
Accepted: 30 September 2022
Published: 04 November 2022
Issue date: April 2023

Copyright

© Tsinghua University Press 2022

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. U2002213 and 52161160331), the Science and Technology Development Fund Macau SAR (No. 0077/2021/A2), the Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, the 111 Project and Joint International Research Laboratory of Carbon-Based Functional Materials and Devices.

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