Unraveling the Durable Water Oxidation Mechanism of Multi-principal Elemental Metal Catalyst

Abstract

Nanoscale multi-principal element metal (MPEM) offers a diverse and adjustable compositional range of active, holding promise for applications in water oxidation. Nevertheless, the synthesis of MPEM nanoparticles poses challenges owing to the tendency of particles to experience growth, aggregation, or phase separation during annealing processes. Here, we introduce a rapid heating and cooling method that enables the fabrication of rare earth-containing MPEM through instantaneous heating and rapid cooling processes. The TEM results indicate that the metal particles are roughly around 120 nm in size, with uniform distribution of various metal elements on the particles. The X-ray characterizations further reveal that the metal catalyst exhibits predominantly a face-centered cubic (FCC) structure with partial oxidation on the surface. Notably, the obtained MPEM catalysts exhibit a current density of 10 mA/cm² with an overpotential of 244 mV, which is 26 and 104 mV lower than the overpotentials of FeCoNiCr and commercial RuO₂. Moreover, the MPEM catalyst can operate stably for over 200 h at current densities of 10 and 100 mA/cm².

Keywords

Joule heating / Multi-principal element particle / Oxygen evolution reaction / Chemical Sciences / Inorganic Chemistry / Physical Chemistry (incl. Structural) / Other Chemical Sciences

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RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

Jilin University, The Editorial Department of Chemical Research in Chinese Universities and Springer-Verlag GmbH