Enhancing *CO intermediate coverage on the CuAlOx catalyst for the CO2 electroreduction to multicarbon products

Abstract

Cu-based electrochemical catalysts are of great potential in converting CO₂ to energy-intensive multicarbon products by utilizing sustainable energy. While there exist challenges in obtaining high selectivity for specific products due to the other unavoidable competitive reaction pathways. Herein, we incorporate the Al element into Cu-based oxide by the simple wet chemical method to obtain the Cu-Al bimetallic oxide with Cu⁺/Cu⁰⁺ active sites. The electrocatalytic measurement shows that the Cu₉₀Al₁₀O_x catalyst possesses good electrocatalytic capacity with the highest C₂ Faradic efficiency of 79.3 % at 300 mA cm⁻². It is demonstrated that the biggest ratio of FE_C2: FE_C1 is 4.82 in Cu₉₀Al₁₀O_x, which is about 4 times of CuO_x (FE_C2: FE_C1 = 1.24). The in situ attenuated total reflectance surface-enhanced infrared absorption spectroscopy measurements exhibit that the catalyst can modulate the binding energy and enhance the adsorption ability of the *CO intermediate, which promotes the reaction pathway of multicarbon products and affects the intrinsic catalytic ability.