Effect of the coordination environment of Cu in Cu₂O on the electroreduction of CO₂to ethylene

Cuprous oxide catalysts have attracted much attention because they exhibited high selectivity of C2+ products in CO2 electroreduction, but the effect of the structure of catalysts on the reaction needs to be studied further. Herein, we studied the effect of the coordination number (CN) of Cu-Cu and Cu-O in Cu2O on the catalytic performance of CO2 electrocatalytic reduction to C2H4. It was demonstrated that Cu-Cu CN and Cu-O CN, which could be tuned by changing the crystal surface and size of Cu2O, influenced the current density and faradaic efficiency (FE) of C2H4 significantly. At suitable CNs, the FE of C2H4 could reach 50.6% with a current density of 24.5 mA cm-2.