(585bk) Optimizing Acid-Stable Metal-Oxides for Oxygen Evolution Reaction

Oxygen Evolution Reaction (OER) is the most important reaction for electro-chemical proton production from water. It occurs exclusively at high anodic potentials (> 1.23 eV vs SHE) in water solution when metal ellectrode is subject to corrosion and passivation by derived metal-oxides. In alkaline media, a number of stable and active first-row 3d-transition metal-oxides is known for this process. In acid media, only the oxides of noble metals (PtO2 and IrO2) are suffeciently active and stable at these conditions and no earth-abundant alternatives exits.

In our computational work, we explore how common and stable passivation oxides such as TiO2, MoO3, WO3, Cr2O3, SnO2 and PbO2 can be utilized as OER catalyts in acidic media. We explore the number of strategies such as doping with OER active elements, formation of stable binary or ternary alloys from opposite sites of OER volcano and oxygen substition by other ligands.