Abstract
THE performance of low temperature fuel cells is usually limited by the speed of the cathodic reduction of oxygen, 
One explanation of the slowness of the reaction is the need to break the O—O bond, which requires considerable energy, even for oxygen in the adsorbed state. An alternative explanation1–3 is that the reaction is slow because it can occur only at scarce favourable sites on the electrode surface. This mechanism, called pseudo-splitting, accounts for the nature of oxygen electrode polarization curves and predicts that the electrode current density i will be proportional to the square root of p, the oxygen partial pressure.
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GOLDSTEIN, J., TSEUNG, A. A Joint Pseudo-splitting/Peroxide Mechanism for Oxygen Reduction at Fuel Cell Cathodes. Nature 222, 869–870 (1969). https://doi.org/10.1038/222869a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/222869a0
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