2025 AIChE Annual Meeting

(676g) Membraneless Trickle-Bed Electrolyzer for Electrochemical CO2 Conversion

Authors

Zhexi Lin - Presenter, Columbia University
Maggie Liu, Columbia University
Lucas Cohen, Columbia University
Zedong Zhang, Northwestern University
Devon Edwards, Giner Labs
Andrew Weber, Giner Labs
Tianyu Zhang, Giner Labs
Emily Tong, Giner Labs
Judith Lattimer, Giner Labs
Ke Xie, Northwestern University
Edward Sargent, University of Toronto
Daniel Esposito, Columbia University
Electrochemical CO2 reduction has emerged as a promising method for converting CO2 into valuable fuels and chemicals to address the challenges associated with rising CO2 levels.1 Although there has been significant development in conventional membrane-based CO2 electrolyzers, these systems suffer from membrane degradation,2 buildup of concentration gradients that lead to CO2 back conversion,3 and electrolyte salting out issues.4 In contrast, membraneless flow-through electrolyzers have demonstrated a pathway to addressing these issues. The membraneless approach eliminates membrane degradation issues and reduces costs, and the flow-through design also minimizes concentration gradients while allowing for higher throughput.5-7

In this work, we developed a membraneless flow-through trickle-bed electrolyzer (TBE) and evaluated its performance with reversible hydrogen chemistry as well as CO2-to-CO conversion. Preliminary results show that our TBE can achieve industrially relevant current density (> 200 mA cm-2 at 0.5 V cell voltage) using the reversible hydrogen chemistry. Parametric studies indicate that lower liquid flow rates (< 5 mL min-1 cm-2), higher gas flow rates (> 35 mL min-1cm-2), and moderate Pt loadings (> 0.15 mg cm-2) are needed to achieve these current densities. A 1-D model has been developed to correlate with the experimental results while pointing out optimization pathways for improving performance. We also demonstrated the feasibility of syngas production from CO2 in the TBE as well as the scalability of the design, paving the way for low-cost, stable, and scalable CO2 electrolyzer design.

References

1. Nitopi et al., Chem. Rev. 2019, 119, 12, 7610–7672.

2. Papakonstantinou et al., Applied Energy, 2020, 280, 115911.

3. Rabinowitz et al., Nat Commun, 2020, 11, 5231.

4. Garg et al., Energy Environ. Sci., 2023, 16, 1631-1643.

5. Esposito, Joule, 2017, 1, 651–658.

6. Pang et al., Joule, 2022, 6,2745–2761.

7. Oloman et al., J Appl Electrochem,1979, 9, 117–123.