Ultrasmall Abundant Metal-Based Clusters as Oxygen-Evolving Catalysts

Autor: Thomas Wågberg, Xing-Yan Tang, Xin-Bao Han, Lan-Sun Zheng, Sangui Liu, Hong-Gang Liao, Eduardo Gracia-Espino, Yuan-Zhi Tan, Su-Yuan Xie, Yue Lin, Xin-Jing Zhao, Guangzhi Hu, Hai-Wei Liang
Rok vydání: 2018
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of the American Chemical Society. 141(1)
ISSN: 1520-5126
Popis: The oxygen evolution reaction is a crucial step in water electrolysis to develop clean and renewable energy. Although noble metal-based catalysts have demonstrated high activity for the oxygen evolution reaction, their application is limited by their high cost and low availability. Here we report the use of a molecule-to-cluster strategy for preparing ultrasmall trimetallic clusters by using the polyoxometalate molecule as a precursor. Ultrafine (0.8 nm) transition-metal clusters with controllable chemical composition are obtained. The transition-metal clusters enable highly efficient oxygen evolution through water electrolysis in alkaline media, manifested by an overpotential of 192 mV at 10 mA cm–2, a low Tafel slope of 36 mV dec–1, and long-term stability for 30 h of electrolysis. We note, however, that besides the excellent performance as an oxygen evolution catalyst, our molecule-to-cluster strategy provides a means to achieve well-defined transition-metal clusters in the subnanometer regime, which p...
Databáze: OpenAIRE