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

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