From the era of industrial revolution, global carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration has increased continuously. This caused a number of environmental problems such as global warming, which has significant influence to human civilization these days. In order to retard the rate of CO2 increase or to possibly reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it is considered highly desirable to convert CO2 into industrially useful chemical species. Recently, large research efforts in electrochemical reduction of CO2 led to promising results. Among various electrocatalysts, tin-based materials have shown excellent performances for production of formate (HCOO–); however, large overpotential was often required to obtain a reasonably high selectivity. Meanwhile, latest studies revealed that native oxide film on Sn foil serves as active sites for CO2 electroreduction, and based on this discovery, we herein synthesized nanostructured tin oxide (SnOx) and applied it as electrode materials for CO2 reduction. The SnOx successfully converted CO2 molecules HCOO– at a high selectivity under moderate overpotentials, even at a large operation currents due to its nano-sized morphologies. We expect that these findings could provide new insights for future practical applications of tin-based materials as CO2 reduction electrocatalysts.

Nanostructured tin electrode for high-performance electrochemical CO2 reduction

2019 Fall National Meeting

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