BACKGROUND With a rising global population, increasing energy demands, and impending climate change, major concerns have been raised over the security of our energy future. Developing sustainable, fossil-free pathways to produce fuels and chemicals of global importance could play a major role in reducing carbon dioxide emissions while providing the feedstocks needed to make the products we use on a daily basis. One prospective goal is to develop electrochemical conversion processes that can convert molecules in the atmosphere (e.g., water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen) into higher-value products (e.g., hydrogen, hydrocarbons, oxygenates, and ammonia) by coupling to renewable energy. Electrocatalysts play a key role in these energy conversion technologies because they increase the rate, efficiency, and selectivity of the chemical transformations involved. Today’s electrocatalysts, however, are inadequate. The grand challenge is to develop advanced electrocatalysts with the enhanced performance needed to enable widespread penetration of clean energy technologies. ADVANCES Over the past decade, substantial progress has been made in understanding several key electrochemical transformations, particularly those that involve water, hydrogen, and oxygen. The combination of theoretical and experimental studies working in concert has proven to be a successful strategy in this respect, yielding a framework to understand catalytic trends that can ultimately provide rational guidance toward the development of improved catalysts. Catalyst design strategies that aim to increase the number of active sites and/or increase the intrinsic activity of each active site have been successfully developed. The field of hydrogen evolution, for example, has seen important breakthroughs over the years in the development of highly active non–precious metal catalysts in acid. Notable advancements have also been made in the design of oxygen reduction and evolution catalysts, although there remains substantial room for improvement. The combination of theory and experiment elucidates the remaining challenges in developing further improved catalysts, often involving scaling relations among reactive intermediates. This understanding serves as an initial platform to design strategies to circumvent technical obstacles, opening up opportunities and approaches to develop higher-performance electrocatalysts for a wide range of reactions. OUTLOOK A systematic framework of combining theory and experiment in electrocatalysis helps to uncover broader governing principles that can be used to understand a wide variety of electrochemical transformations. These principles can be applied to other emerging and promising clean energy reactions, including hydrogen peroxide production, carbon dioxide reduction, and nitrogen reduction, among others. Although current paradigms for catalyst development have been helpful to date, a number of challenges need to be successfully addressed in order to achieve major breakthroughs. One important frontier, for example, is the development of both experimental and computational methods that can rapidly elucidate reaction mechanisms on broad classes of materials and in a wide range of operating conditions (e.g., pH, solvent, electrolyte). Such efforts would build on current frameworks for understanding catalysis to provide the deeper insights needed to fine-tune catalyst properties in an optimal manner. The long-term goal is to continue improving the activity and selectivity of these catalysts in order to realize the prospects of using renewable energy to provide the fuels and chemicals that we need for a sustainable energy future.

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Combining theory and experiment in electrocatalysis: Insights into materials design

There is still an ongoing effort to search for sustainable, clean and highly efficient energy generation to satisfy the energy needs of modern society. Among various advanced technologies, electrocatalysis for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) plays a key role and numerous new electrocatalysts have been developed to improve the efficiency of gas evolution. Along the way, enormous effort has been devoted to finding high-performance electrocatalysts, which has also stimulated the invention of new techniques to investigate the properties of materials or the fundamental mechanism of the OER. This accumulated knowledge not only establishes the foundation of the mechanism of the OER, but also points out the important criteria for a good electrocatalyst based on a variety of studies. Even though it may be difficult to include all cases, the aim of this review is to inspect the current progress and offer a comprehensive insight toward the OER. This review begins with examining the theoretical principles of electrode kinetics and some measurement criteria for achieving a fair evaluation among the catalysts. The second part of this review acquaints some materials for performing OER activity, in which the metal oxide materials build the basis of OER mechanism while non-oxide materials exhibit greatly promising performance toward overall water-splitting. Attention of this review is also paid to in situ approaches to electrocatalytic behavior during OER, and this information is crucial and can provide efficient strategies to design perfect electrocatalysts for OER. Finally, the OER mechanism from the perspective of both recent experimental and theoretical investigations is discussed, as well as probable strategies for improving OER performance with regards to future developments.

Electrocatalysis for the oxygen evolution reaction: recent development and future perspectives

A fundamental change has been achieved in understanding surface electrochemistry due to the profound knowledge of the nature of electrocatalytic processes accumulated over the past several decades and to the recent technological advances in spectroscopy and high resolution imaging. Nowadays one can preferably design electrocatalysts based on the deep theoretical knowledge of electronic structures, via computer-guided engineering of the surface and (electro)chemical properties of materials, followed by the synthesis of practical materials with high performance for specific reactions. This review provides insights into both theoretical and experimental electrochemistry toward a better understanding of a series of key clean energy conversion reactions including oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), oxygen evolution reaction (OER), and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). The emphasis of this review is on the origin of the electrocatalytic activity of nanostructured catalysts toward the aforementioned reactions by correlating the apparent electrode performance with their intrinsic electrochemical properties. Also, a rational design of electrocatalysts is proposed starting from the most fundamental aspects of the electronic structure engineering to a more practical level of nanotechnological fabrication.

Design of electrocatalysts for oxygen- and hydrogen-involving energy conversion reactions

The pace of materials discovery for heterogeneous catalysts and electrocatalysts could, in principle, be accelerated by the development of efficient computational screening methods. This would require an integrated approach, where the catalytic activity and stability of new materials are evaluated and where predictions are benchmarked by careful synthesis and experimental tests. In this contribution, we present a density functional theory-based, high-throughput screening scheme that successfully uses these strategies to identify a new electrocatalyst for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). The activity of over 700 binary surface alloys is evaluated theoretically; the stability of each alloy in electrochemical environments is also estimated. BiPt is found to have a predicted activity comparable to, or even better than, pure Pt, the archetypical HER catalyst. This alloy is synthesized and tested experimentally and shows improved HER performance compared with pure Pt, in agreement with the computational screening results.

Computational high-throughput screening of electrocatalytic materials for hydrogen evolution

Over the past decade the theoretical description of surface reactions has undergone a radical development. Advances in density functional theory mean it is now possible to describe catalytic reactions at surfaces with the detail and accuracy required for computational results to compare favourably with experiments. Theoretical methods can be used to describe surface chemical reactions in detail and to understand variations in catalytic activity from one catalyst to another. Here, we review the first steps towards using computational methods to design new catalysts. Examples include screening for catalysts with increased activity and catalysts with improved selectivity. We discuss how, in the future, such methods may be used to engineer the electronic structure of the active surface by changing its composition and structure.

Towards the computational design of solid catalysts

We present a method for calculating the stability of reaction intermediates of electrochemical processes on the basis of electronic structure calculations. We used that method in combination with detailed density functional calculations to develop a detailed description of the free-energy landscape of the electrochemical oxygen reduction reaction over Pt(111) as a function of applied bias. This allowed us to identify the origin of the overpotential found for this reaction. Adsorbed oxygen and hydroxyl are found to be very stable intermediates at potentials close to equilibrium, and the calculated rate constant for the activated proton/electron transfer to adsorbed oxygen or hydroxyl can account quantitatively for the observed kinetics. On the basis of a database of calculated oxygen and hydroxyl adsorption energies, the trends in the oxygen reduction rate for a large number of different transition and noble metals can be accounted for. Alternative reaction mechanisms involving proton/electron transfer to ...

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Origin of the Overpotential for Oxygen Reduction at a Fuel-Cell Cathode

Catalyst design by interpolation in the periodic table: bimetallic ammonia synthesis catalysts.

Based on an extensive set of density functional theory calculations it is shown that for a class of catalytic reactions there is a universal, reactant independent relation between the reaction activation energy and the stability of reaction intermediates. This leads directly to a universal relationship between adsorption energies and catalytic activity, which is used to pinpoint what it is that determines the best catalyst for a given reaction. The universality principle rationalizes a number of known facts about catalysts and points to new ways of improving them. c � 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)

and Ashildur Logadottir

Papers

Origin of the Overpotential for Oxygen Reduction at a Fuel-Cell Cathode

Catalyst design by interpolation in the periodic table: bimetallic ammonia synthesis catalysts.

PRIORITY COMMUNICATION Universality in Heterogeneous Catalysis