Congratulations to Min for her Chemical Science paper!

© 2022 EPFL

© 2022 EPFL

Tandem schemes including CO-producing molecular catalysts and copper are promising to boost ethylene production. How do we design more efficient systems?

In this work, we developed tunable tandem catalysts comprising iron porphyrin (Fe-Por), as the CO-generating component, and Cu nanocubes (Cucub) to understand how the turnover frequency for CO (TOFCO) of the molecular catalysts impacts the C–C coupling on the Cu surface. The most efficient Cucub/Fe-Por tandem catalyst was the one including the Fe-Por with the highest TOFCO and exhibited a nearly 22-fold increase in the ethylene selectivity and 100 mV positive shift of the onset potential with respect to the pristine Cucub. Our results reveal that coupling the TOFCO tunability of molecular catalysts with copper nanocatalysts opens up new possibilities towards the development of Cu-based catalysts with enhanced selectivity for multi-carbon product generation at low overpotential. Read the rest of the story here!

Funding

EU-funded LICROX FET project (Grant agreement 951843)