Accelerated development of gas diffusion electrodes for CO2 electrolyzers

Here we present a high-throughput flexible automation system, AdaCarbon, to accelerate the development of gas diffusion electrodes (GDEs) for CO2 electrolysis. AdaCarbon consists of a team of seven robots with automated modules for GDE fabrication and characterization and an automated test cell (ATC) that performs zero-gap CO2 electrolysis. We use this platform to fabricate and test 90 GDEs (30 unique GDEs in triplicate) with varied compositions of Cu-Ag metal and Nafion-Sustainion ionomer bilayers with the goal of increasing the yield of ethylene produced at the current density of 200 mA cm–2. We show GDEs with higher Cu and Nafion ionomer content increased ethylene selectivity 5 to 9%. We also demonstrate that AdaCarbon accelerates the workflow for making and testing GDEs by a factor of three compared to a manual workflow.