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Room-temperature ligancy engineering of perovskite electrocatalyst for enhanced electrochemical water oxidation

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Abstract

Perovskite oxides are significant candidates to develop electrochemical catalysts for water oxidation in consideration of their high catalysis capacity, low costing and excellent stability. Rational design of coordination structure and overcoming poor electronic transport are regarded as critical factors for outstanding perovskite-based oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts. Herein, we report a mild chemical oxidation method to realize ligancy engineering from strongly-correlated brownmillerite Sr2Co2O5 to perovskite phase Sr2Co2O55, along with abundant oxygen vacancies formation and greatly boosted electric conductivity, which helps to form the active species of Co hydroxide/oxide on the surface of catalysts. The coupling effect of catalytic kinetics and unimpeded electronic movement brings high OER activities in Sr2Co2O55with a low onset potential and a small Tafel slope. Our work not only displays in-depth understanding into the relationship among catalysis performance and multiple physical degrees of freedom, but also paves a new path to develop high-efficient electrochemical catalysts.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of Chnia (No. 2017YFA0207301), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. U1632154, 21890751, 91745113, 11621063, 21601172, and J1030412), National Program for Support of Top-notch Young Professionals, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. WK2090050043), Youth Innovation Promotion Association of CAS (No. 2018500), Users with Excellence Project of Hefei Science Center (No. CAS2018HSC-UE002). We appreciate the support from the USTC Center for Micro and Nanoscale Research and Fabrication.

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  1. Junchi Wu and Yuqiao Guo contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials (iChEM), and CAS Key Laboratory of Mechanical Behavior and Design of Materials, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Junchi Wu, Yuqiao Guo, Jiyin Zhao, Haodong Zhou & Changzheng Wu

  2. National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Wangsheng Chu

  3. Analytical and Testing Center, Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang, 621010, China

    Haifeng Liu

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  1. Junchi Wu
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  2. Yuqiao Guo
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  3. Haifeng Liu
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Correspondence to Changzheng Wu.

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Wu, J., Guo, Y., Liu, H. et al. Room-temperature ligancy engineering of perovskite electrocatalyst for enhanced electrochemical water oxidation. Nano Res. 12, 2296–2301 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-019-2409-5

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