Boosting Oxygen Evolution Reaction by Creating Both Metal Ion and Lattice-Oxygen Active Sites in a Complex Oxide

Yinlong Zhu; Hassan A Tahini; Zhiwei Hu; Zhi-Gang Chen; Wei Zhou; Alexander C Komarek; Qian Lin; Hong-Ji Lin; Chien-Te Chen; Yijun Zhong; M T Fernández-Díaz; Sean C Smith; Huanting Wang; Meilin Liu; Zongping Shao

doi:10.1002/adma.201905025

Boosting Oxygen Evolution Reaction by Creating Both Metal Ion and Lattice-Oxygen Active Sites in a Complex Oxide

Adv Mater. 2020 Jan;32(1):e1905025. doi: 10.1002/adma.201905025. Epub 2019 Nov 12.

Authors

Yinlong Zhu^{1

2}, Hassan A Tahini³, Zhiwei Hu⁴, Zhi-Gang Chen^{5

6}, Wei Zhou¹, Alexander C Komarek⁴, Qian Lin¹, Hong-Ji Lin⁷, Chien-Te Chen⁷, Yijun Zhong⁸, M T Fernández-Díaz⁹, Sean C Smith³, Huanting Wang², Meilin Liu¹⁰, Zongping Shao^{1

8}

Affiliations

¹ Jiangsu National Synergetic Innovation Center for Advanced Materials (SICAM), State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, College of Chemical Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, No. 5 Xin Mofan Road, Nanjing, 210009, P. R. China.
² Department of Chemical Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, 3800, Australia.
³ Department of Applied Mathematics, Research School of Physics and Engineering, Australian National University, Canberra, 2601, Australia.
⁴ Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Nothnitzer Strasse 40, Dresden, 01187, Germany.
⁵ Centre for Future Materials, University of Southern Queensland, Springfield, Queensland, 4300, Australia.
⁶ Materials Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, 4072, Australia.
⁷ National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, 101 Hsin-Ann Road, Hsinchu, 30076, Taiwan.
⁸ Department of Chemical Engineering, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, 6845, Australia.
⁹ Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL), 71 avenue des Martyrs, F-38042, Grenoble, Cedex 9, France.
¹⁰ Center for Innovative Fuel Cell and Battery Technologies, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0245, USA.

PMID: 31713899
DOI: 10.1002/adma.201905025

Abstract

Developing efficient and low-cost electrocatalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is of paramount importance to many chemical and energy transformation technologies. The diversity and flexibility of metal oxides offer numerous degrees of freedom for enhancing catalytic activity by tailoring their physicochemical properties, but the active site of current metal oxides for OER is still limited to either metal ions or lattice oxygen. Here, a new complex oxide with unique hexagonal structure consisting of one honeycomb-like network, Ba₄ Sr₄ (Co_0.8 Fe_0.2 )₄ O₁₅ (hex-BSCF), is reported, demonstrating ultrahigh OER activity because both the tetrahedral Co ions and the octahedral oxygen ions on the surface are active, as confirmed by combined X-ray absorption spectroscopy analysis and theoretical calculations. The bulk hex-BSCF material synthesized by the facile and scalable sol-gel method achieves 10 mA cm^-2 at a low overpotential of only 340 mV (and small Tafel slope of 47 mV dec^-1 ) in 0.1 m KOH, surpassing most metal oxides ever reported for OER, while maintaining excellent durability. This study opens up a new avenue to dramatically enhancing catalytic activity of metal oxides for other applications through rational design of structures with multiple active sites.

Keywords: complex oxides; coordination environment; dual active sites; honeycomb-like structures; oxygen evolution reaction.

Abstract

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