Reveals enhanced CO2 reduction efficiency through tailored *OH adsorption in engineered amorphous catalysts, indicating promising design strategies.
The catalyst surface microenvironment, particularly *OH adsorption, plays a decisive role in CO₂ electroreduction. Precise engineering of amorphous surface microenvironments enables efficient *OH adsorption. While Cu-based catalysts show promise for the CO₂ reduction reaction (CO₂RR), controlling atomic-scale surface configurations remains challenging. Herein, we construct amorphous CuSnOx (a-CuSnOx) with tailored surface microenvironments through strategic Cu-Sn integration, achieving >90% formate Faradaic efficiency across broad current densities. Unlike its crystalline counterparts, the amorphous structure provides a high density of undercoordinated Cu and Sn sites, which collectively promote the adsorption of *OH, verified by the ¹⁷O NMR experiments. Operando ¹H and ¹⁷O NMR analysis reveals that *OH directly involves formate production via a water-assisted mechanism. This *OH adsorption-dominated microenvironment directly facilitates formate generation, establishing a new design strategy for high-performance CO₂RR catalysts and deepening the fundamental understanding of structure-activity relationships.
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Huang et al. (2026) studied this question.
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