An Insight into Anchoring of Cobalt Phthalocyanines onto Carbon: Efficiency of the CO2 Reduction Reaction

Electrochemical CO2 reduction into CO with metal phthalocyanines/substrate catalysts has been receiving extensive attention due to unique activities and tunability. However, the anchoring sites and reaction mechanism still remain much debatable. In this work, through integrations of Raman spectroscopy with theoretical calculations, the anchoring location site and mechanism of CoPc on substrates were confirmed using cobalt phthalocyanine on acetylene black as model catalysts. The theoretical calculations show that the resultant CoPc/C catalyst exhibits an excellent catalytic activity for electrocatalytic CO2 reduction with low overpotential and high selectivity of CO because the defect beneath the benzene ring is more effective in anchoring CoPc.