Electrochemical reduction of CO2 is a promising method to close the carbon cycle and thereby contribute to counteracting climate change. A large share of the research is going into the development of new high‐performance catalysts. Often, these catalysts are expensive and difficult to synthesize, especially if considering scaling up to the industrial application. The catalyst is, however, only one factor within the complex system of a CO2‐electrolyzer with numerous parameters to explore and optimize. Herein, an optimization process relying on a commercial copper nanopowder as a catalyst is reported. By replacing conductive carbon with polytetrafluoroethylene as the base material of the gas diffusion electrode (GDE) and applying a pulsed potential during electrolysis, the average faradaic efficiency for ethylene could be increased from 38% over 20 h to 50% over 100 h. In addition to the five times increased stability of the process, the ethylene‐producing current density rises from 106 to 152 mA cm−2, respectively, while hydrogen evolution was simultaneously reduced. Additionally, further investigations on the interplay of GDE base material, binder, current collector, and catalyst on the electrode performance are presented.
Ag catalysts show high selectivities in the conversion of carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide during the electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction reaction (CO2RR). Indeed, highly catalytically active porous electrodes with increased surface area achieve faradaic conversion efficiencies close to 100%. To establish reliable structure-property relationships, the results of qualitative structural analysis need to be complemented by a more quantitative approach to assess the overall picture. In this paper, we present a combination of suitable methods to characterize foam electrodes, which were synthesised by the Dynamic Hydrogen Bubble Templation (DHBT) approach to be used for the CO2RR. Physicochemical and microscopic techniques in conjunction with electrochemical analyses provide insight into the structure of the carefully tailored electrodes. By elucidating the morphology, we were able to link the electrochemical deposition at higher current densities to a more homogenous and dense structure and hence, achieve a better performance in the conversion of CO2 to valuable products.
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