Front Cover: A Stable Metal‐azolate Framework with Cyclic Tetracopper(I) Clusters for Highly Selective Electroreduction of CO2 to C2 Products (Chem. Asian J. 21/2022)

Abstract

Until now, major electrocatalysts for CO2RR mainly generate C1 products such as CO, HCOOH and CH4; in contrast, research on electrocatalytic CO2 reduction to generate C2 products (C2H4, C2H5OH, and CH3COOH) is yet in the primary stage. It is well known that bi-copper active sites are essential to C-C coupling in CO2RR for valuable C2 products. Here, a tetracopper(I) cluster-based metal-azolate framework (CuBPZ) is applied as the catalyst for electroreduction of CO2. CuBPZ exhibits long-term stability and remarkable performance for electroreduction CO2 towards C2 products in an H-type cell with a maximum faradaic efficiency (FE) of 72%, and delivers a current density of 350 mA cm-2 with a FE(C2) up to 46 % in a flow cell, outperforming most of the electrocatalysts for CO2RR to C2 products. This work not only highlights the potential application of MAF materials in CO2RR, but also provides a new strategy for the design of the active sites composed of multi-nuclear metal ions to achieve enhanced performance for conversion of CO2 to C2 chemicals. More information can be found in the Research Article by Pei-Qin Liao et al.