Ultrasmall Abundant Metal-Based Clusters as Oxygen-Evolving Catalysts

作者：Xin‐Bao Han, Xingyan Tang, Yue Lin, Eduardo Gracia‐Espino, Sangui Liu, Hai‐Wei Liang, Guangzhi Hu, Xin‐Jing Zhao, Hong‐Gang Liao, Yuan‐Zhi Tan, Thomas Wågberg, Su‐Yuan Xie, Lan‐Sun Zheng · 发表于：Journal of the American Chemical Society · 年份：2018 · DOI：10.1021/jacs.8b09076 · 被引用次数：73 · 研究领域：Electrocatalysts for Energy Conversion、Machine Learning in Materials Science、Catalytic Processes in Materials Science

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 potentially can have an impact on several other applications.