Electrocatalytic Films: from Nanodiffusion to Functional Electrocatalysts

Abstract

Electrochemical water splitting is one of the clean technologies for the production on a large scale of highly pure dihydrogen H2, a potential major energy vector for the near future. Benchmarking protocols for evaluating the electrocatalytic water splitting have been proposed over the years in order to rationalize the assessment of the activity and stability of heterogeneous hydrogen and oxygen evolution reaction (HER and OER) electrocatalysts. Nevertheless, it is still difficult to have access to reliable electrochemical measurements to get a direct insight into the mechanism for the HER and OER due to the complexity of these multiple electron/proton transfer reactions. In-depth cyclic voltammetry (CV) analysis has been shown to be a very powerful tool to address intricate reaction mechanisms involving proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) reactions.[1] We demonstrated that we could use this analytical technique to study intramolecular PCET reactions,[2] molecular bond breaking coupled with PCET reactions,[3] molecular catalytic reactions coupled with PCET,[4] and heterogeneous electrocatalyst mechanisms involving PCET.[5] Those fundamental reactions are illustrated with theoretical analysis and experimental examples.[6]

References

1. a) Bonin, J.; et al. C. Acc. Chem. Res. 2012, 45, 372; b) Costentin, C.; et al. Acc. Chem. Res. 2014, 47, 271.
2. Costentin, C.; et al. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2010, 49, 3803.
3. a) Costentin, C.; et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2011, 108, 8559; b) Savéant, J.-M.; Tard, C. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2014, 136, 8907.
4. a) Savéant, J.-M.; Tard, C. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2016, 138, 1017; b) Costentin, C.; Savéant, J.-M.; Tard, C. ACS Energy Lett. 2018, 3, 695.
5. Costentin, C.; et al. C. Nat. Mat. 2017, 16, 1016.
6. Faustini, M.; et al. Adv. Energy Mater. 2019, 9, 1802136; b) Elmaalouf, M; et al. Nat. Commun. 2021, 12, 3935.


Biography

Cédric Tard is currently a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau, Fance). He obtained BSc from the University Paris Saclay (France) and PhD from the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK).