Experimental screening of intermetallic alloys for electrochemical CO₂ reduction

Experimental screening of intermetallic alloys for electrochemical CO₂ reduction

van den Berg, D. (TU Delft Large Scale Energy Storage)
Brouwer, J.C. (TU Delft Team Marcel Hermans)
Hendrikx, R.W.A. (TU Delft Team Amarante Bottger)
Kortlever, R. (TU Delft Large Scale Energy Storage)

2024

In this study, we experimentally screen a promising class of intermetallic alloys for the electrochemical reduction of CO₂ toward hydrocarbon products. Based on previous DFT-based screening papers, combinations of strongly CO-binding metals such as iron, cobalt, and nickel with weakly CO-binding metals such as gallium, aluminium or zinc were selected as potentially promising catalytic materials. Despite the challenging production of these alloys, we report a general two-step synthesis method for intermetallic alloys and discuss the specific synthesis conditions that must be taken into account when synthesising these materials. After their synthesis, we use a recently developed differential electrochemical mass spectrometry (DEMS) setup to rapidly quantify the CO₂ reduction products over a range of potentials. Almost all newly developed intermetallic catalysts are shown to produce methane and ethylene, while the CoSn catalyst showed higher selectivity towards formate production. However, all tested catalysts mostly produced hydrogen and only reduce CO₂ to a small extent, despite the favourable computational screening results. We discuss possible reasons for this discrepancy and outline a more holistic approach for linking future DFT studies with experiments.

Electrocatalysis
Electrochemical CO reduction
Intermetallic alloys
Screening
Spark Plasma Sintering

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f1494962-4c39-4455-a762-80ae68fb66ef

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cattod.2024.114805

0920-5861

Catalysis Today, 439

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2024 D. van den Berg, J.C. Brouwer, R.W.A. Hendrikx, R. Kortlever