In situ Electrochemical Restructuring Integrating Corrosion Engineering to Fabricate Zn Nanosheets for Efficient CO2 Electroreduction

Electrocatalytic CO 2 conversion to value-added chemicals is a fascinating strategy for the sustainable recycling of greenhouse gas while developing a facile synthesis method for highly efficient electrocatalysts remains a great challenge. Herein, the spontaneous alkali corrosion combined with in situ electrochemical restructuring strategy was developed to fabricate the self-supporting Zn nanosheets array (Zn NSs) on Zn foil for CO 2 electroreduction. The in situ transformed two-dimensional Zn NSs provide larger active area and show faster reaction kinetics and electron transfer rate compared with Zn nanoparticles and Zn foil, thus exhibiting outstanding performance for electrocatalytic CO 2 to CO: j CO is 9.9 mA cm −2 and 19.8 mA cm −2 at −0.9 and −1.0 V vs. RHE, respectively; Faraday efficiency (FE) of CO reaches 92% at −0.9 V vs. RHE; the stability can remain 14 h at −0.9 V vs. RHE. This work provides a facile and low-energy-consumption method to fabricate efficient electrocatalysts for CO 2 recycling. Graphical Abstract The present work presents simple spontaneous corrosion and in situ electrochemical restructuring strategy to get Zn nanosheets for electrocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide, featuring its synthetic strategy and electrocatalytic CO 2 reduction performance.