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Best practices for oxygen electrocatalysis

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Oxygen electrocatalysis is key for energy conversion and storage technologies such as fuel cells and water electrolysers. However, the measurement of the performance of electrocatalysts is not standardized. This Comment addresses emerging pitfalls in performance evaluation and discusses best practices for oxygen electrocatalysis.

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Fig. 1: Schematic illustration of the recommended practices for oxygen electrocatalysis.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial support from Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) MTC Individual Research Grants (IRG) M22K2c0078, the Singapore National Research Foundation under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) programme, and the Startup Foundation for Hundred-Talent Program of Zhejiang University. We thank H. Iriawan for his comments and edits.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Yubo Chen & Zhichuan J. Xu

  2. Hydrogen Energy Institute, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Yubo Chen

  3. Institute of Process Equipment, College of Energy Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Yubo Chen

  4. The Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Yubo Chen & Zhichuan J. Xu

  5. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Daniel J. Zheng & Yang Shao-Horn

  6. Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Yang Shao-Horn

  7. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Yang Shao-Horn

Authors
  1. Yubo Chen
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  2. Daniel J. Zheng
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  3. Zhichuan J. Xu
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  4. Yang Shao-Horn
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Zhichuan J. Xu or Yang Shao-Horn.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Shannon Boettcher, Alexandr G. Oshchepkov, Weiran Zheng and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Chen, Y., Zheng, D.J., Xu, Z.J. et al. Best practices for oxygen electrocatalysis. Nat Sustain 7, 371–374 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01285-y

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