近日，课题组博士生刘腾论文“Jointly Engineering Surface Area and Oxygen Vacancies on ZnO for Efficient Electrochemical CO2 Reduction to CO”被Langmuir接收！

ABSTRACT:

Zinc oxide (ZnO) is an outstanding functional material with high selectivity and features low cost and non-toxicity for the electroreduction of CO₂ to CO. To ensure the industrialization of the prepared materials, besides catalytic performance, the synthetic method of the materials is also crucial. In this work, porous ZnO nanosheets (ZnO NS) with moderate concentration of oxygen vacancies were successfully synthesized through a facile method by annealing treatment under an inert atmosphere. The effects of different temperatures on the morphology and catalytic properties of porous ZnO NS were systematically studied. The catalyst, ZnO NS-500, exhibits outstanding selectivity and catalytic activity for CO in the electrocatalytic CO₂ reduction reaction, achieving a faradaic efficiency as high as 86% at -1.3 V vs. RHE. Furthermore, when ZnO NS-500 was constructed as the cathode of Zn-CO₂ battery (ZCB) with a Zn plate as the anode, the battery reached the power density as high as 1.58 mW cm^-2 at 1.8 mA cm^-2 during the discharge, showing its outstanding capability for supplying power. Besides its largeBrunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area, the excellent catalytic performance of ZnO NS-500 is mainly attributed to the adsorption and activation of CO₂ molecules over oxygen vacancy sites. This work offers an experimental strategy for the synthesis of high-performance undoped ZnO-based electrocatalyst.