Abstract
Rational design of efficient hydrogen oxidation reaction (HOR) electrocatalysts with maximum utilization of platinum-group metal sites is critical to hydrogen fuel cells, but remains a major challenge due to the formidable potential-dependent energy barrier for hydrogen intermediate (H*) desorption on single metal centres. Here we report atomically dispersed iridium–phosphorus (Ir–P) catalytic pairs with strong electronic coupling that integratively facilitate HOR kinetics, in which the reactive hydroxyl species adsorbed on the more oxophilic P site induces an alternative thermodynamic pathway to facilely combine with H* on the adjacent Ir atom, whereas isolated single-atom Ir catalysts are inactive. In H2–O2 fuel cells, this catalyst enables a peak power density of 1.93 W cm−2 and an anodic mass activity as high as 17.11 A mgIr−1 at 0.9 ViR-free, significantly outperforming commercial Pt/C. This work not only advances the development of anodic catalysts for fuel cells, but also provides a precise and universal active-site design principle for multi-intermediate catalysis.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.
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Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the City University of Hong Kong start up fund and the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (AME IRG A20E5c0080). H.B.Y. acknowledges support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 22075195). Y.L. acknowledges support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 52171199). S.-F.H. acknowledges financial support from the National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan (contract number NSTC 111-2628-M-A49-007). Part of this work was also financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (number 2022YFA1503102), the NSFC (numbers 22022504, 22033005 and 92261111), the Science, Technology and Innovation Commission of Shenzhen Municipality (number JCYJ20210324103608023), the Guangdong ‘Pearl River’ Talent Plan (number 2019QN01L353) and the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Catalysis (number 2020B121201002). Computational resources are supported by the Center for Computational Science and Engineering at SUSTech and the CHEM high-performance supercomputer cluster (CHEM-HPC) located in the Department of Chemistry, SUSTech.
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Q.W., H.B.Y. and B.L. conceived and designed the project. Q.W., Y.C. and H.B.Y. performed the catalyst synthesis, structural characterizations and electrochemical measurements. W.L., W.W. and Y.H. obtained the TEM images. C.-W.T., S.-F.H., W.C. and H.M.C acquired the X-ray absorption spectroscopies and provided expertise for data analysis. H.W., Z.Z., H.B.T. and Y.L. conducted the fuel cell tests. H.C., C.Z., Y.-G.W. and J.L. carried out the theoretical calculations. Q.W., H.B.Y. and B.L. discussed the results and drafted the article. All the authors reviewed and contributed to this paper.
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Nature Catalysis thanks Lin Zhuang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Table of Contents, Supplementary Figs. 1–61, Tables 1–4 and References.
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Atomic coordinates of the optimized computational models, initial and final configurations in molecular dynamics simulations.
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Wang, Q., Wang, H., Cao, H. et al. Atomic metal–non-metal catalytic pair drives efficient hydrogen oxidation catalysis in fuel cells. Nat Catal 6, 916–926 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-023-01017-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-023-01017-z
