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

Ethylene (C 2 H 4 ) is an important product in carbon dioxide electroreduction (CO 2 RR) 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 C 2 H 4 faradaic efficiency, maintaining high selectivity toward C 2 H 4 in CO 2 RR remains an unresolved problem hampering the deployment of CO 2 conversion technology due to the lack of stable electrocatalysts. Here, we develop a facile method to deposit a layer of Cu 2 O 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 C 2 H 4 faradaic efficiency of ∼50% in CO 2 RR at a potential around -1.0 V vs. RHE. The C 2 H 4 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 CO 2 RR to produce C 2 H 4 for more than 6 months.