Fig. 1: Electrocatalyst morphology and performance variations after CO2 reduction and multiscale in situ X-ray scattering methodology. | Nature Communications

Fig. 1: Electrocatalyst morphology and performance variations after CO2 reduction and multiscale in situ X-ray scattering methodology.

From: Multiscale X-ray scattering elucidates activation and deactivation of oxide-derived copper electrocatalysts for CO2 reduction

Fig. 1

Cartoons showing the main products formed during electrochemical CO2 reduction over octahedral Cu2O electrocatalyst particles at early stages of cathodic bias (a) and after prolonged operation up to 30 min (b). Representative ex situ SEM images of pristine Cu2O (c) and spent Cu electrocatalyst particles after 15 (d) and 30 min (e) of –1.0 VRHE cathodic bias, showing increasing surface roughness on various length scales. f Illustration of the custom electrochemical cell used for the in situ X-ray scattering experiments. Detectors show representative 2D in situ wide- and small-angle X-ray scattering patterns and the length scales probed with WAXS and SAXS. The dashed arrows show the azimuthal integration of the data and the solid arrows the scattering vector q. g Faradaic efficiency of the three main CO2 reduction reaction gas products at –1.0 VRHE over the course of one hour (note: H2 is omitted from this plot, and included in Supplementary Fig. SI5). The error bars correspond to data from three independent experiments. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

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