Jim de Ruiter
Utrecht University"Probing the chemical landscape of copper catalysts during CO2 electroreduction using Raman spectroscopy"
Jim de Ruiter is a PhD candidate in the Inorganic Chemistry and Catalysis (ICC) group at Utrecht University. During his PhD journey, he tries to understand the copper catalyzed electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) using various types of vibrational spectroscopy techniques. Currently, he is mainly working with (time-resolved) Raman spectroscopy, as this is a great tool to simultaneously probe the active copper surface, electrolyte species and reaction intermediates. In his talk he will show how we could identify the chemical landscape of a copper catalyst at different cathodic and anodic potentials and how we were able to differentiate between deterministic and stochastic catalytic routes of CO2-to-CO formation at low overpotentials. Moreover, they found that dynamic rearrangement of well-defined copper nanoparticle surfaces changes the active site, allowing us to elucidate the dynamics of C-C coupling intermediates.