Design principles for oxygen-reduction activity on perovskite oxide catalysts for fuel cells and met

Abstract

The prohibitive cost and scarcity of the noble-metal catalysts needed for catalysing the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in fuel cells and metal–air batteries limit the commercialization of these clean-energy technologies. Identifying a catalyst design principle that links material properties to the catalytic activity can accelerate the search for highly active and abundant transition-metal-oxide catalysts to replace platinum. Here, we demonstrate that the ORR activity for oxide catalysts primarily correlates to σ*-orbital (eg) occupation and the extent of B-site transition-metal–oxygen covalency, which serves as a secondary activity descriptor. Our findings reflect the critical influences of the σ* orbital and metal–oxygen covalency on the competition between O22–/OH– displacement and OH– regeneration on surface transition-metal ions as the rate-limiting steps of the ORR, and thus highlight the importance of electronic structure in controlling oxide catalytic activity. With the cost of noble metal oxygen-reduction catalysts rendering some fuel cells and batteries prohibitively expensive, the search for effective and cheaper catalysts is underway and would be speeded up by ‘design principles’. Now, the catalytic activity of oxide materials has been correlated to σ*-orbital occupation and the extent of metal–oxygen covalency.

Cite this article

Suntivich, J., Gasteiger, H., Yabuuchi, N. et al. Design principles for oxygen-reduction activity on perovskite oxide catalysts for fuel cells and metal–air batteries. Nature Chem 3, 546–550 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.1069

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