Carbon monoxide electrolysis has the potential to unlock new routes to sustainable C₂₊ chemicals. Improvements to CO reduction (COR) gas diffusion electrodes (GDEs) are critical for advancing CO electrolysis cells, but a comprehensive understanding of COR GDEs remains elusive because of the complex interplay of physical and chemical processes under operating conditions and the difficulty of experimentally probing the heterogeneous environment of a GDE. In this study, we build a model for COR GDEs that includes fully coupled gas and ion transport and competing electrokinetic reactions. The transport and electrokinetic equations are solved in two dimensions to calculate critical COR figures of merit across multiple operating parameters including current density, flow rate, pressure, temperature, and electrochemically active surface area (ECSA). We validate our model by showing agreement with experimental data for steady-state CO electrolysis at various pressures and flow rates and then apply it to see how the figures of merit depend on the operating parameters over a wide range of values. We demonstrate that increasing the cell pressure above ambient and augmenting the ECSA of the catalyst are two effective strategies to improve cathode performance.

中文翻译：

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优化 CO 还原气体扩散电极的连续体模型

一氧化碳电解有可能开辟可持续 C ₂₊化学品的新途径。 CO 还原 (COR) 气体扩散电极 (GDE) 的改进对于推进 CO 电解槽至关重要，但由于操作条件下物理和化学过程的复杂相互作用以及实验探测的难度，对 COR GDE 的全面了解仍然难以实现。 GDE 的异构环境。在这项研究中，我们建立了一个 COR GDE 模型，其中包括完全耦合的气体和离子传输以及竞争动电反应。输运和动电方程以二维方式求解，以计算多个操作参数（包括电流密度、流速、压力、温度和电化学活性表面积 (ECSA)）的临界 COR 品质因数。我们通过在不同压力和流速下显示与稳态 CO 电解的实验数据的一致性来验证我们的模型，然后应用它来查看品质因数如何依赖于大范围值的操作参数。我们证明，提高电池压力高于环境压力和增加催化剂的 ECSA 是提高阴极性能的两种有效策略。