The development of a highly efficient noniridium-based oxygen evolution reaction catalyst is the key to realizing large-scale commercial application of the proton-exchange membrane water electrolyzer.RuO_(2)is the mos...The development of a highly efficient noniridium-based oxygen evolution reaction catalyst is the key to realizing large-scale commercial application of the proton-exchange membrane water electrolyzer.RuO_(2)is the most promising alternative to IrO_(2),but if usually suffers from lattice-oxygenmediated corrosion and sluggish proton transfer kinetics under acidic media.Herein,we propose an effective strategy of embedding RuO_(2)nanoparticles into a N-doped carbon support,termed as RuO_(2)-NC,to simultaneously prevent Ru dissolution and accelerate the bridging-oxygen-assisted deprotonation process.The obtained RuO_(2)-NC electrocatalyst presents high activity with an overpotential of 159 mV to reach 10 mA cm^(−2) and remarkable stability for over 240 h.Structural investigation and theoretical calculations reveal that the electron-rich NC substrate,as an electron donor,provides a buffered charge compensation to protect RuO_(2)from excessive oxidation and lattice oxygen loss by switching into a conventional adsorbate evolution mechanism(AEM).More importantly,the activated bridging oxygen(Obri)sites can facilitate the deprotonation of*OOH intermediates,leading to an optimized bridging-oxygen-assisted deprotonation AEM pathway.展开更多
基金financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(grant nos.22272121 and 21972107)We thank the core facility of Wuhan University for the measurement of XPS.We also thank the Core Research Facilities of the College of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences for the measurement of TEM.DFT calculations in this paper have been done on the supercomputing system in the Supercomputing Center of Wuhan University.W.L.conceived and supervised the project.H.J.and Z.L.synthesized the electrocatalysts and performed the catalytic tests and characterization.J.Z.performed the DFT calculations.W.L.and H.J.wrote the manuscript.All the authors discussed the results and assisted during the manuscript preparation.
文摘The development of a highly efficient noniridium-based oxygen evolution reaction catalyst is the key to realizing large-scale commercial application of the proton-exchange membrane water electrolyzer.RuO_(2)is the most promising alternative to IrO_(2),but if usually suffers from lattice-oxygenmediated corrosion and sluggish proton transfer kinetics under acidic media.Herein,we propose an effective strategy of embedding RuO_(2)nanoparticles into a N-doped carbon support,termed as RuO_(2)-NC,to simultaneously prevent Ru dissolution and accelerate the bridging-oxygen-assisted deprotonation process.The obtained RuO_(2)-NC electrocatalyst presents high activity with an overpotential of 159 mV to reach 10 mA cm^(−2) and remarkable stability for over 240 h.Structural investigation and theoretical calculations reveal that the electron-rich NC substrate,as an electron donor,provides a buffered charge compensation to protect RuO_(2)from excessive oxidation and lattice oxygen loss by switching into a conventional adsorbate evolution mechanism(AEM).More importantly,the activated bridging oxygen(Obri)sites can facilitate the deprotonation of*OOH intermediates,leading to an optimized bridging-oxygen-assisted deprotonation AEM pathway.
