Premio di Laurea “Ametek Scientific Instruments”: Electrochemical Conversion of Carbon Dioxide to Formic Acid. Study of the Effect of the Operating Parameters

Electrochemical conversion of CO2 is considered one of the more appealing approaches to introduce renewable energy in the chemical and energy chain and to mitigate the greenhouse gases effect. In this work, the reduction of carbon dioxide was performed in undivided electrochemical cell to produce formic acid, which is one of the highest value-added chemicals and economically feasible for large-scale applications (1). It is well known that the main hurdle of the reduction of CO2 from water solution is the low CO2 solubility in water. In order to overcome this obstacle, a specific investigation on the effect of the CO2 pressure and other operating parameters at tin flat cathodes was carried out. It was shown that an increase of the pressure leads to a drastic enhancement of the formic acid concentration. Indeed, the utilization of moderately high CO2 pressures (15–30 bar) allowed to obtain high concentrations of formic acid (up to 0.46 mol L-1) at high current density (up to 90 mA cm-2) employing cheap and simple undivided cell (2).