Metal Surface and Interface Energy Electrocatalysis: Fundamentals, Performance Engineering, and Opportunities

By Yong Yang, Mingchuan Luo, Weiyu Zhang, Yingjun Sun, Xu Chen, Shaojun Guo. Chem, 2018

288 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Electrochemical processes for renewable energy conversion and generation represent promising pathways for lowering our dependence on fossil fuels yet critically depend on the efficiency of applied electrocatalysts, thus attracting considerable interest in the development of highly active and robust electrocatalysts for practical applications. In this review, we discuss recent progress in promoting electrocatalysis for renewable energy technologies based on surface or interface engineering with special emphasis on the geometric structures. We first introduce the state-of-the-art engineering methods for achieving the desired surface or interface and correlate these structures with their catalytic performances. Then, we describe classic examples of rational surfaces and interfaces for tuning metallic nanomaterials for several key catalytic reactions in renewable energy technologies, including the hydrogen evolution and oxidation reactions, oxygen reduction and evolution reactions, methanol oxidation reaction, and electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction. Finally, we provide personal perspectives to highlight the challenges and opportunities for metallic electrocatalysts in terms of catalysis-driven surface and interface engineering.

Subfields: Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5fa45c79e4ca0b8440d1f60571982987718b6473