Abstract
Production of methanol from electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide is very attractive. However, achieving high Faradaic efficiency with high current density using facile prepared catalysts remains to be a challenge. Herein we report that copper selenide nanocatalysts have outstanding performance for electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to methanol, and the current density can be as high as 41.5 mA cm−2 with a Faradaic efficiency of 77.6% at a low overpotential of 285 mV. The copper and selenium in the catalysts cooperate very well for the formation of methanol. The current density is higher than those reported up to date with very high Faradaic efficiency for producing methanol. As far as we know, this is the first work for electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide using copper selenide as the catalyst.
Highlights
Production of methanol from electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide is very attractive
It is clearly shown that the VDETA/VH2O affected the morphology of the Cu2−xSe(y) nanocatalysts considerably (Supplementary Fig. 2)
The images of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) (Fig. 1a) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) (Fig. 1b) reveal that the size of the Cu1.63Se(1/3) nanoparticles was ~50 nm, which is consistent with the results obtained from dynamic light scattering (DLS, inset of Fig. 1a)
Summary
Production of methanol from electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide is very attractive. We report a facile solvothermal synthesis of Cu2−xSe(y) nanocatalysts in diethylenetriamine (DETA, Supplementary Fig. 1 for the structure) and H2O binary solution, where y represents the volume ratio of DETA and water (VDETA/VH2O), and the value of x is in the range of 0.3 to 0.4, depending on the atom ratio of Cu and Se in the catalysts.
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