Synthesis and Characterization of Copper-Silver Bimetallic Cathodes for Electroreduction of Carbon Dioxide

My thesis work “Synthesis and Characterization of Copper-Silver Bimetallic Cathodes for Electroreduction of Carbon Dioxide” has the aim to research and study innovative catalysts to obtain high-value products by reducing CO2, a dangerous greenhouse gas and a common waste of industrial processes. In particular, the work aims at exploiting the ability of certain metals that, when employed as electrodes in electrochemical cells, have the capability to catalyze the chemical reactions of interest. Although, the process would seem rather simple, in the reality it presents many problems. Firstly, CO2 is a very stable gas and therefore difficult to reduce; this makes the reduction process an energy intensive one. In addition, high activity, selectivity, and durability of the catalysts are very difficult goals to achieve. To understand how a material behaves when subjected to the electrochemical test, are often carried out computational modelling methods such as Density-functional theory (DFT), but the experimental data obtained do not always agree with theoretical simulations, and this is because of the complexity of the phenomena and mechanisms occurring at the nanoscale. The activity of this work can be divided in three main sections: (i) synthesis of bimetallic compounds, (ii) electrochemical characterization of the obtained samples, (iii) structural and chemo-physical characterization of the bimetallic synthetized material. The idea behind the development of Cu-Ag bimetallic catalysts is to promote the CO adsorption on Cu surface thanks to the presence of silver, a metal that presents notable selectivity for converting CO2 to CO and, in this way, enhances electrode selectivity for multicarbon (C2) products through CO dimerization. The activities described above have yielded interesting results and the examined material has showed high C2 production.