Proceedings of MATSUS Spring 2024 Conference (MATSUS24)
Publication date: 18th December 2023
Direct coupling of photovoltaic (PV) devices to electrochemical CO2 reduction (CO2R) electrolyzers is a carbon utilization and storage technology that mimics natural photosynthesis using an electrochemical (EC) cell. It aims to realise a carbon cycle by converting CO2 and H2O into value‑added chemicals with PV power. CO2R reaction products, such as formic acid, provide long-term storage of solar energy and help to offset the intermittent nature of PV power generation [1]. A flow EC cell with a CO2 gas chamber for high gas exchange rate sketched in Figure 1 was employed for the CO2 reduction. Synthesised Cu2O:S nanoparticles were used to fabricate the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) electrode with an area of 5.3 cm2 on a gas diffusion layer (GDL) substrate. It was paired with IrO2·2H2O/GDL oxygen evolution reaction (OER) gas diffusion electrode (GDE). In this work, we evaluated the electrolyzer in terms of catalyst stability, product selectivity and activity over a voltage range of 2.4 V - 3.2 V at ambient temperature and pressure whereby the HER catalyst selectively produced HCOO⁻ and H2. Across this voltage range, the selectivity to HCOO⁻ decreased from 69.5 % to 60.1 % and the selectivity towards H2 increased from 30.4 % to 42.2 % as the total current densities increased from 10.5 mA/cm2 to 30.1 mA/cm2. The maximal solar-to-fuel efficiency estimated for a common PV module efficiency of 22 % ideally coupled to the EC cell peaks at 2.4 V at a total of 12.55 %, with 9.11 % towards the production of formate for PV to EC area ratio of 1.1. Lastly, the performance of the PV‑EC device was investigated at 40°C using a PV emulator reproducing output IV characteristics of any required PV module with precision and accuracy on par with A+ solar simulator. The emulator was used to reproduce the output of a high efficiency Si heterojunction PV module on a sunny day in a cycling procedure under irradiance and temperature ranging from 0.2 sun to 1.1 sun and 20°C to 55°C, respectively. The electrolyzer was tested over five cycles, each lasting 1.47 h with a total laboratory time of 7.35 h. The system performance was evaluated with energies integrated over the whole testing period. The coupling efficiency of PV‑EC combination (ratio of generated PV energy to maximum attainable PV energy) was 95 %, PV efficiency was 21.93 %, and total solar-to-fuel efficiency was 11.03 %, with 3.52 % towards the production of formate. We will present and discuss the cycling behaviour of the PV-EC device and its stability as well as the selectivity of the HER catalyst in terms of faradaic efficiency and solar-to-fuel efficiency.
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