Issue 34, 2022

Electrochemical CO2 reduction catalyzed by atomically precise alkynyl-protected Au7Ag8, Ag9Cu6, and Au2Ag8Cu5 nanoclusters: probing the effect of multi-metal core on selectivity

Abstract

Doping metal nanoclusters (NCs) with another metal usually leads to superior catalytic performance toward CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR), yet elucidating the metal core effect is still challenging. Herein, we report the systematic study of atomically precise alkynyl-protected Au7Ag8, Ag9Cu6, and Au2Ag8Cu5 NCs toward CO2RR. Au2Ag8Cu5 prepared by a site-specific metal exchange approach from Ag9Cu6 is the first case of trimetallic superatom with full-alkynyl protection. The three M15 clusters exhibited drastically different CO2RR performance. Specifically, Au7Ag8 demonstrated high selectivity for CO formation in a wide voltage range (98.1% faradaic efficiency, FE, at −0.49 V and 89.0% FE at −1.20 V vs. RHE), while formation of formate becomes significant for Ag9Cu6 and Au2Ag8Cu5 at more negative potentials. DFT calculations demonstrated that the exposed, undercoordinated metal atoms are the active sites and the hydride transfer as well as HCOO* stabilization on the Cu–Ag site plays a critical role in the formate formation. Our work shows that, tuning the metal centers of the ultrasmall metal NCs via metal exchange is very useful to probe the structure–selectivity relationships for CO2RR.

Graphical abstract: Electrochemical CO2 reduction catalyzed by atomically precise alkynyl-protected Au7Ag8, Ag9Cu6, and Au2Ag8Cu5 nanoclusters: probing the effect of multi-metal core on selectivity

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
23 May 2022
Accepted
12 Aug 2022
First published
15 Aug 2022
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2022,13, 10149-10158

Electrochemical CO2 reduction catalyzed by atomically precise alkynyl-protected Au7Ag8, Ag9Cu6, and Au2Ag8Cu5 nanoclusters: probing the effect of multi-metal core on selectivity

X. Ma, F. Sun, L. Qin, Y. Liu, X. Kang, L. Wang, D. Jiang, Q. Tang and Z. Tang, Chem. Sci., 2022, 13, 10149 DOI: 10.1039/D2SC02886G

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