Hydrogen energy is increasingly favored as a kind of high-energy-density renewable clean energy. When hydrogen is produced by electrolyzed water, precious metal catalysts (such as antimony oxide) with high cost and rare reserves have been used in the past. The reporter learned from Nanjing University of Technology. The school developed a new type of non-precious metal catalyst to replace the traditional ruthenium oxide catalyst, the price is only one thousandth of ruthenium oxide. This research result was published in Nature Communication.
According to the research team Professor Zhou Wei, this anti-perovskite-based new non-precious metal catalyst not only has high catalytic activity, good stability, low energy consumption, but also good quality and low price. Anti-perovskite combined with perovskite structure Flexibility and high conductivity of transition metal nitrogen (carbon) compounds, excellent electrocatalytic properties, etc., is theoretically a promising oxygen evolution reaction electrocatalyst. However, it has a similar bottleneck with perovskite materials. The phase temperature is as high as several hundred or even thousands of degrees Celsius, resulting in severe material sintering, low specific surface area, and minimal exposure of active sites. In view of this, the research team first designed an anti-perovskite catalyst, and subsequently developed a Porous composite catalyst with core-shell structure. The catalyst only needs a voltage higher than the thermodynamic theory by 0.23V, which can drive the occurrence of oxygen evolution reaction.
According to Zhu Yanping, the first author of the paper, when hydrogen is produced by electrolysis of water, both the cathode and the anode react, the cathode produces hydrogen, and the anode produces oxygen. The anode reaction is very slow, which limits the overall catalytic efficiency, so we developed this The non-precious metal catalyst of the anode makes the rate of oxygen production faster, so that the hydrogen production will not be dragged, and the overall efficiency of hydrogen production is greatly improved.
The new non-precious metal catalyst developed in this research has both high catalytic activity and stability, and is only one thousandth of the price compared with the low-cost, high-cost (600 yuan / gram) cerium oxide. The actual application shows great prospects.
