Breaking adsorption-energy scaling limitations of electrocatalytic nitrate reduction on intermetallic CuPd nanocubes by machine-learned insights

Abstract

The electrochemical nitrate reduction reaction (NO₃RR) to ammonia is an essential step toward restoring the globally disrupted nitrogen cycle. In search of highly efficient electrocatalysts, tailoring catalytic sites with ligand and strain effects in random alloys is a common approach but remains limited due to the ubiquitous energy-scaling relations. With interpretable machine learning, we unravel a mechanism of breaking adsorption-energy scaling relations through the site-specific Pauli repulsion interactions of the metal d-states with adsorbate frontier orbitals. The non-scaling behavior can be realized on (100)-type sites of ordered B2 intermetallics, in which the orbital overlap between the hollow *N and subsurface metal atoms is significant while the bridge-bidentate *NO₃ is not directly affected. Among those intermetallics predicted, we synthesize monodisperse ordered B2 CuPd nanocubes that demonstrate high performance for NO₃RR to ammonia with a Faradaic efficiency of 92.5% at -0.5 V_RHE and a yield rate of 6.25 mol h^-1 g^-1 at -0.6 V_RHE. This study provides machine-learned design rules besides the d-band center metrics, paving the path toward data-driven discovery of catalytic materials beyond linear scaling limitations.