title: Highly Efficient, Selective, and Stable CO2 Electroreduction on a Hexagonal Zn Catalyst.
abstract: Electrocatalytic CO2 conversion into fuel is a prospective strategy for the sustainable energy production. However, still many parts of the catalyst such as low catalytic activity, selectivity, and stability are challenging. Herein, a hierarchical hexagonal Zn catalyst showed highly efficient and, more importantly, stable performance as an electrocatalyst for selectively producing CO. Moreover, we found that its high selectivity for CO is attributed to morphology. In electrochemical analysis, Zn (101) facet is favorable to CO formation whereas Zn (002) facet favors the H2 evolution during CO2 electrolysis. Indeed, DFT calculations showed that (101) facet lowers a reduction potential for CO2 to CO by more effectively stabilizing a (.) COOH intermediate than (002) facet. This further suggests that tuning the crystal structure to control (101)/(002) facet ratio of Zn can be considered as a key design principle to achieve a desirable product from Zn catalyst.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Da Hye
authors.initials: da H
authors.lastname: Won
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Energy, Environment, Water and Sustainability (EEWS), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Hyeyoung
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Shin
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Energy, Environment, Water and Sustainability (EEWS), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Jaekang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Koh
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Jaehoon
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chung
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Hee Sang
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Energy, Environment, Water and Sustainability (EEWS), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea. linus16@kaist.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Hyungjun
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea. siwoo@kaist.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Seong Ihl
authors.initials: SI
authors.lastname: Woo
keywords: carbon dioxide; carbon monoxide; density functional calculations; electrocatalysis; zinc