Researchers Develop Highly Efficient Hollow Copper Electrodes

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The method can be used for a wide variety of chemical processes requiring gas conversion, in particular because the method used to manufacture the fibres is also suited to materials other than copper; it could apply, for instance, to oxygen conversion in a fuel cell, or hydrogen conversion in the electrochemical production of ammonia.

The researchers particularly envisage an important area of application for these copper electrodes to be in the steel industry, where large volumes of CO2 are produced and CO is needed to convert iron ore into iron. The application of these fibres could lead to a step increase in sustainability in this area. The operation of the fibre has been demonstrated in the laboratory; working together with the Institute for Sustainable Process Technology the researchers now plan to optimize the design and develop the methods to suit industrial applications.

Research

The research was carried out by researchers in the Photocatalytic Synthesis (Professor Mul) and Films in Fluids (Professor Benes) research groups within the University of Twente research institute MESA+, working together with researchers in the Catalysis and Surface Chemistry (Professor Koper) research group at Leiden University. The research was funded in part by NanoNextNL. The research results were recently published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, under the title ‘Three-dimensional porous hollow fibre copper electrodes for efficient and high-rate electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction’.

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