Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sacco, Adriano
• Speranza, Roberto
• Savino, Umberto
• Zeng, Juqin
• Farkhondehfal, M. Amin
• Lamberti, Andrea
• Chiodoni, Angelica
• Pirri, Candido F

Titel

An Integrated Device for the Solar-Driven Electrochemical Conversion of CO2 to CO

Ist Teil von

• ACS sustainable chemistry & engineering, 2020-05, Vol.8 (20), p.7563-7568

Ort / Verlag

American Chemical Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The conversion of carbon dioxide into value-added products using sunlight, also called artificial photosynthesis, represents a remarkable and sustainable approach to store solar energy, transforming it into chemical energy. There are mainly two strategies to carry out this process: the photocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) or the photovoltaic-powered electrochemical reduction of CO2. Herein, we focus on the latter route, i.e., the development of a device coupling a solar cell to an electrochemical reactor for CO2 reduction. Different literature works demonstrated the possibility to achieve such a coupling, but no evidence of a real integration between the two systems has been given up to now. In this work, we present an integrated device constituted by a dye-sensitized solar module (based on a mesoporous titanium dioxide photoanode) and an electrochemical cell (based on a copper–tin cathode). The integration of the two systems is accomplished through a common platinum-based electrode, which acts either as a cathode for the photovoltaic module and as an anode for the electrochemical reactor. The integrated system was characterized by a stable current of 3.6 mA under continuous solar irradiation, enabling the production of 80 mmol of carbon monoxide per day, with a solar-to-fuel efficiency equal to 0.97%.