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As efficient catalysts of electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) towards multicarbon (C2+) products, Cu-based catalysts have faced the challenges of increasing the reactive activity and selectivity. Herein, we decorated the surface of Cu nanowires (Cu NWs) with a small amount of Au nanoparticles (Au NPs) by the homo-nucleation method. When the Au to Cu mass ratio is as little as 0.7 to 99.3, the gold-doped copper nanowires (Cu-Au NWs) could effectively improve the selectivity and activity of CO2RR to C2+ resultants, with the Faradaic efficiency (FE) from 39.7% (Cu NWs) to 65.3%, and the partial current density from 7.0 (Cu NWs) to 12.1 mA/cm2 under −1.25 V vs. reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE). The enhanced electrocatalytic performance could be attributed to the following three synergetic factors. The addition of Au nanoparticles caused a rougher surface of the catalyst, which allowed for more active sites exposed. Besides, Au sites generated ⋆CO intermediates spilling over into Cu sites with the calculated efficiency of 87.2%, which are necessary for multicarbon production. Meanwhile, the interphase electron transferred from Cu to Au induced the electron-deficient Cu, which favored the adsorption of ⋆CO to further generate multicarbon productions. Our results uncovered the morphology, tandem, and electronic effect between Cu NWs and Au NPs facilitated the activity and selectivity of CO2RR to multicarbons.
Wei et al. (Sat,) studied this question.