Grain-Boundary Engineering Boosted Undercoordinated Active Sites for Scalable Conversion of CO2 to Ethylene

Abstract The development of highly selective and energy efficient technologies for electrochemical CO2 reduction combined with renewable energy sources holds great promise for advancing the field of sustainable chemistry. The engineering of copper-based electrodes provides a pathway for the conversion of CO2 into high-value multicarbon products (C2+). However, the ambiguous determination of the intrinsic CO2 activity and the maximization of the density of exposed active sites have severely limited the use of Cu for the realization of practical electrocatalytic devices. Here, we report a scalable strategy to obtain a high density of undercoordinated sites by maximizing the exposure of twin-boundary active sites using a direct chronoamperometric pulse method. Our numerical investigations predicted that twin-boundaries modulate the adsorption behavior of *CO on the Cu surface, which acts as a key intermediate species associated with the production of multicarbon species. We investigated the consequence of twin-boundary density on dendric Cu catalysts (TB-Cu) by combining transmission electron microscopy, in-situ Raman and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy with detailed electrochemical measurements. A linear relationship between the Faradaic efficiency of the C2+ product and the presence of under-coordinated sites was observed, which allowed to directly quantify the contribution of the twin-boundary in Cu-based catalysts on the CO2RR properties and the formation of multicarbon products. Using a membrane electrode assembly electrolyzer, the high twin-boundary density Cu electrodes achieve a maximum Faradaic efficiency of 73.2 % for C2+ product formation and a full cell energy efficiency of 20.2 % at a specific current density of 303.6 mA cm-2. The TB-Cu was implemented in a 25 cm2 MEA electrolyzer and demonstrated selectivity of over 62 % for 70 hours together with current retention of 88.4 % at the applied potential of -3.80 V. The catalysts and electrolyzer were further coupled to an InGaP/GaAs/Ge triple-junction solar cell to demonstrate a solar-to-fuel (STF) conversion efficiency of 8.33 %. This work opens new avenues for the design of an undercoordinated Cu-based catalyst for the realization of solar-driven fuel production.