(475d) Novel Metal Oxide As Highly Acid Stable Electrocatalyst for Oxygen Evolution Reaction in Water Splitting

Electrochemical process is among the most important systems in chemical engineering field for addressing the energy and environmental science problems, such as sustainable energy generation and storage. Water splitting is one process that focuses on renewable and environmental friendly approach to the generation of hydrogen fuel. The key reaction, oxygen evolution reaction (OER), has a sluggish kinetic and thus huge over-potential, so there is an urgent need for solving this problem for efficient electrolyzer. Recent results show that RuO₂ and IrO₂ are still the most useful OER catalysts due to their performance in acidic system; although their durability still does not match the requirement. In this presentation, I will discuss a new class of metal oxide can be used as highly active and durable electrocatalyst for OER. Sol-gel synthesized oxide catalyst with improved intermediate kinetic initiation was analyzed and compared with commercial RuO₂. The OER activity was analyzed by cyclic voltammetry (CV) with potential range from 1.1 to 1.6 V and scan rate of 10 mV/s. The result showed that the newly developed OER catalyst had much higher current density in the range and gave smaller values of onset potential as well as Tafel slope compare to RuO₂ catalyst. For durability analysis, corresponding 10,000 cycles of CV were performed. The newly-developed catalyst also maintained exceptional high current density and low Tafel slope. This new discovery of the OER catalysts may help to improve the efficiency of hydrogen generation based on water splitting and provide an aspect on potential materials of electrocatalysts.