Alleviating OH Blockage on the Catalyst Surface by the Puncture Effect of Single-Atom Sites to Boost Alkaline Water Electrolysis

Xingen Lin; Wenfeng Hu; Jie Xu; Xiaokang Liu; Wei Jiang; Xianhui Ma; Dayin He; Zihan Wang; Wanqing Li; Li-Ming Yang; Huang Zhou; Yuen Wu

doi:10.1021/jacs.3c13676

Alleviating OH Blockage on the Catalyst Surface by the Puncture Effect of Single-Atom Sites to Boost Alkaline Water Electrolysis

J Am Chem Soc. 2024 Feb 21;146(7):4883-4891. doi: 10.1021/jacs.3c13676. Epub 2024 Feb 7.

Authors

Xingen Lin¹, Wenfeng Hu², Jie Xu³, Xiaokang Liu⁴, Wei Jiang⁴, Xianhui Ma¹, Dayin He¹, Zihan Wang¹, Wanqing Li¹, Li-Ming Yang², Huang Zhou¹, Yuen Wu¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Endocrinology, Institute of Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases, The First Affiliated Hospital of USTC, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230001, China.
² Key Laboratory of Material Chemistry for Energy Conversion and Storage, Ministry of Education; Hubei Key Laboratory of Bioinorganic Chemistry and Materia Medica; Hubei Key Laboratory of Materials Chemistry and Service Failure; Hubei Engineering Research Center for Biomaterials and Medical Protective Materials; School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
³ College of Chemistry and Materials Engineering, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, Zhejiang 325035, China.
⁴ National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China.

PMID: 38326284
DOI: 10.1021/jacs.3c13676

Abstract

Nonprecious transition metal catalysts have emerged as the preferred choice for industrial alkaline water electrolysis due to their cost-effectiveness. However, their overstrong binding energy to adsorbed OH often results in the blockage of active sites, particularly in the cathodic hydrogen evolution reaction. Herein, we found that single-atom sites exhibit a puncture effect to effectively alleviate OH blockades, thereby significantly enhancing the alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance. Typically, after anchoring single Ru atoms onto tungsten carbides, the overpotential at 10 mA·cm^-2 is reduced by more than 130 mV (159 vs 21 mV). Also, the mass activity is increased 16-fold over commercial Pt/C (MA₁₀₀ = 17.3 A·mg_Ru^-1 vs 1.1 A·mg_Pt^-1, Pt/C). More importantly, such electrocatalyst-based alkaline anion-exchange membrane water electrolyzers can exhibit an ultralow potential (1.79 V_cell) and high stability at an industrial current density of 1.0 A·cm^-2. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the isolated Ru sites could weaken the surrounding local OH binding energy, thus puncturing OH blockage and constructing bifunctional interfaces between Ru atoms and the support to accelerate water dissociation. Our findings exhibit generality to other transition metal catalysts (such as Mo) and contribute to the advancement of industrial-scale alkaline water electrolysis.