Scale up of reactors for carbon dioxide reduction

In recent times there has been a great deal of interest in the conversion of carbon dioxide into more useful chemical compounds. On the other hand, the translation of these developments in electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide from the laboratory bench to practical scale remains an underexplored topic. Here we examine some of the major challenges, demonstrating some promising strategies towards such scale-up, including increased electrode area and stacking of electrode pairs in different configurations. We observed that increasing the electrode area from 1 to 10 cm2 led to only a 4% drop in current density, with similarly small penalties realised when stacking sub-cells together.[Figure not available: see fulltext.]