Developing robust oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts requires significant advances in material design and in-depth understanding for water electrolysis. Herein, we report iridium clusters stabilized surface reconstructed oxyhydroxides on amorphous metal borides array, achieving an ultralow overpotential of 178 mV at 10 mA cm-2 for OER in alkaline medium. The coupling of iridium clusters induced the formation of high valence cobalt species and Ir-O-Co bridge between iridium and oxyhydroxides at the atomic scale, engineering lattice oxygen activation and non-concerted proton-electron transfer to trigger multiple active sites for intrinsic pH-dependent OER activity. The lattice oxygen oxidation mechanism (LOM) was confirmed by in situ 18 O isotope labeling mass spectrometry and chemical recognition of negative peroxo-like species. Theoretical simulations reveal that the OER performance on this catalyst is intrinsically dominated by LOM pathway, facilitating the reaction kinetics. This work not only paves an avenue for the rational design of electrocatalysts, but also serves the fundamental insights into the lattice oxygen participation for promising OER application.

Engineering Lattice Oxygen Activation of Iridium Clusters Stabilized on Amorphous Bimetal Borides Array for Oxygen Evolution Reaction.

Tuning the electronic state of a nanocatalyst is of vital importance for elevating its catalytic performance toward oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Herein, a cation-anion dual doping strategy has been proposed for modifying the electronic structure of CoP via doping Fe and S atoms. Impressively, Fe doping has been demonstrated to be favorable for improving the carrier density of CoP to produce more hydroxyl radicals (•OH), while S doping can further modify the electronic structure of CoP to improve the charge-transfer characteristics, thereby synergistically decreasing the energy barrier for the transformation of O* to OOH* and promoting the electrocatalytic OER performance. More importantly, the highly open nanobox structure is also beneficial for the exposure of more accessible catalytically active sites, which can substantially facilitate the electron and mass transport, leading to the superb catalytic OER performance. The successful modulation of OER performance via dual-doping strategy will pose a new strategy for designing more advanced nanocatalysts for energy-related catalysis process.

Cation-Anion Dual Doping Modifying Electronic Structure of Hollow CoP Nanoboxes for Enhanced Water Oxidation Electrocatalysis.

Recent Progress in Transition-Metal Sulfide Catalyst Regulation for Improved Oxygen Evolution Reaction

High cost performance catalysts are urgently required for hydrogen production from electrochemical water electrolysis by the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and slow oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Herein, by means of phosphating CoV-LDH impregnated with Ru (Ru-CoV-LDH/NF), a Vanadium (V)-doped flower-like CoP/Ni2P heterostructure coupled with ultralow Ru (RuV-CoNiP/NF) is constructed. The electronic modulation caused by V doping effectively stimulates the activity of the CoP /Ni2P heterostructure assisted with ultrasmall Ru nanoparticles, thus the formed RuV-CoNiP/NF effectively drives the HER (η10=28 mV) and OER (η20=214 mV) in alkaline media. Impressively, during the overall water decomposition, it requires only an overpotential of 1.469V to achieve 10 mA cm-2, demonstrating almost the most remarkable catalytic performance compared to the past literature. Notably, the catalyst can still positively promote the electrolysis of alkaline seawater: when achieving 20 mA cm-2, the required overpotential is only 1.538 V, which is almost the best experimental result at present. This work provides an idea for achieving high cost performance bifunctional catalysts toward hydrogen production from water and seawater splitting.

Xueda Ding

Papers

Self-template synthesis of hollow Fe-doped CoP prisms with enhanced oxygen evolution reaction activity

Boosting the HER electrocatalytic activity over RuCu-supported carbon nanosheets as efficient pH-independent catalysts