Asymmetry of Multi-electron Transfer Kinetics in Oxygen Electrocatalysis and its Application for Highly Active Catalyst Design

Problems: 1. OER and ORR are two limiting processes that each contributes ~0.4 V loss. 2. Cost and scarcity of noble metal oxide catalysts is prohibitive for practice applications. Technology: The invention describes a method to design efficient, abundant, non-precious-metal catalysts for OER. The design principle looks to develop a more active OER catalyst by engineering the eg filling to a value of ~1.3-1.4. With proper understanding, tuning surface electronic features like the transition metal eg filling is a promising strategy to develop highly active non-precious-metal containing oxide catalysts than can have higher activity than state-of-the-art precious metal-containing material. Christopher Noble crn@mit.edu