Race on engineering noble metal single-atom electrocatalysts for water splitting

The electrooxidation of ethylene glycol (EG) is of vital significance for the conversion from biomass energy into electrical energy via direct fuel cells. However, the EG oxidation reaction (EGOR) suffers from poor efficiency due to the limitation of high-performance electrocatalysts for cleaving the C-C bonds. Herein, this limitation is successfully addressed by fabricating the doughnut-shaped Pd-Bi2Te3 heterostructured catalyst. Notably, the heterojunction Pd-Bi2Te3 nanocatalyst has been demonstrated to be highly active toward the EGOR with superb activity and durability, in which a mass activity as high as 2420.8 mA mg-1 is achieved in alkaline media, being 1.7 times higher than that of the commercial Pd/C catalyst. Upon combination of experimental results with mechanism studies, it is indicated that the remarkable EGOR performance is attributed to the enlarged active areas that stemmed from the doughnut-like structure, as well as the strong synergistic effect from Pd-Bi2Te3 and Pd. More importantly, the highly electroactive Pd-Bi2Te3 can accelerate charge transfer and boost the oxidation of CO-like intermediates, which are conducive to the enhancement in electrochemical stability.

Engineering Heterostructured Pd-Bi2Te3 Doughnut/Pd Hollow Nanospheres for Ethylene Glycol Electrooxidation.

Synergistic coupling of FeNi3 alloy with graphene carbon dots for advanced oxygen evolution reaction electrocatalysis.

Rational design and construction of well-defined hollow heterostructured nanomaterials assembled by ultrathin nanosheets overtakes crucial role in developing high-efficiency oxygen evolution reaction (OER) electrocatalysts. Herein, a reliable metal-organic framework-mediated and cation-exchange strategy to tune the geometric structure and multicomponent heterostructures has been proposed for the fabrication of hollow CoWO4-Co(OH)2 hierarchical nanoboxes assembled by rich ultrathin nanosheets. Benefiting from the hierarchical hollow nanostructure, the CoWO4-Co(OH)2 nanoboxes offer plenty of metal active centers available for reaction intermediates. Moreover, the well-defined nanointerfaces between CoWO4 and Co(OH)2 can function as the bridge for boosting the efficient electron transfer from CoWO4 to Co(OH)2. As a consequence, the optimized CoWO4-Co(OH)2 nanoboxes can exhibit outstanding electrocatalytic performance toward OER by delivering 10 mA cm-2 with a low overpotential of 280 mV and a small Tafel slope of 70.6 mV dec-1 as well as outstanding electrochemical stability. More importantly, this CoWO4-Co(OH)2 heterostructured nanocatalyst can couple with Pt/C to drive overall water splitting to achieve 10 mA cm-2 with a voltage of 1.57 V.

Hui Xu

Papers

Supports promote single-atom catalysts toward advanced electrocatalysis

One-step hydrothermal synthesis of BiVO4/TiO2/RGO composite with effective photocatalytic performance for the degradation of ciprofloxacin