In this Review, we discuss the state-of-the-art understanding of non-precious transition metal oxides that catalyze the oxygen reduction and evolution reactions. Understanding and mastering the kinetics of oxygen electrocatalysis is instrumental to making use of photosynthesis, advancing solar fuels, fuel cells, electrolyzers, and metal–air batteries. We first present key insights, assumptions and limitations of well-known activity descriptors and reaction mechanisms in the past four decades. The turnover frequency of crystalline oxides as promising catalysts is also put into perspective with amorphous oxides and photosystem II. Particular attention is paid to electronic structure parameters that can potentially govern the adsorbate binding strength and thus provide simple rationales and design principles to predict new catalyst chemistries with enhanced activity. We share new perspective synthesizing mechanism and electronic descriptors developed from both molecular orbital and solid state band structure principles. We conclude with an outlook on the opportunities in future research within this rapidly developing field.

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Toward the rational design of non-precious transition metal oxides for oxygen electrocatalysis

Synthesis and catalytic properties of metal nanoparticles: Size, shape, support, composition, and oxidation state effects

Lithium-rich layered transition metal oxide positive electrodes offer access to anion redox at high potentials, thereby promising high energy densities for lithium-ion batteries. However, anion redox is also associated with several unfavorable electrochemical properties, such as open-circuit voltage hysteresis. Here we reveal that in Li1.17-x Ni0.21Co0.08Mn0.54O2, these properties arise from a strong coupling between anion redox and cation migration. We combine various X-ray spectroscopic, microscopic, and structural probes to show that partially reversible transition metal migration decreases the potential of the bulk oxygen redox couple by > 1 V, leading to a reordering in the anionic and cationic redox potentials during cycling. First principles calculations show that this is due to the drastic change in the local oxygen coordination environments associated with the transition metal migration. We propose that this mechanism is involved in stabilizing the oxygen redox couple, which we observe spectroscopically to persist for 500 charge/discharge cycles.

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E. Kneedler

Papers

Soft X-ray Microscopy and Spectroscopy at the Molecular Environmental Science Beamline at the Advanced Light Source