报告题目：Composition, Interface and Structure Engineering in Metal Phosphide Catalysts for Water Electrolyser

报告人：许军元 博士 葡萄牙纳米中心

时间：2017年7月5日 （星期四） 下午15:00

地点：南区唐敖庆楼D区429报告厅

主办单位：材料科学与工程学院

摘要：

Hydrogen (H2) has been proposed to be a clean and carbon-neutral energy carrier that can be used as next-generation fuel to fulfil both stationary and transportation needs. Compared with another process, electrocatalytic water splitting represents a greener and more sustainable way for H2 generation and has been intensively investigated in recent years. However, the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is a half-cell reaction that is essential for water electrolyser. The OER involves four concerted proton-coupled electron transfer steps, and is both thermodynamically and kinetically demanding. Without a catalyst, the OER usually takes place at a high overpotential leading to a large energy loss. Although the H2 evolution reaction (HER) can be accomplished comparatively easily than OER, efficient electrocatalysts are still needed to reduce the overpotential for HER and enable the reaction to take place at a practically high rate. Lately, transition metal phosphide has been demonstrated to be an active catalyst for the HER and OER, and has been investigated as alternatives to platinum group metal in water electrolyser. Notwithstanding remarkable progress, the apparent and intrinsic electrocatalytic activity of phosphide catalyst remain a little low. Here we report the composition, interface and structure engineering in metal phosphide catalysts for water electrolyser in our group, and the developed phosphide catalysts hare have shown high performance toward water electrolyser, compared to the previous work. Meanwhile, our research provides important insight into the activity trend of metal phosphide pre-catalysts and offers useful design guidelines for this specific class of earth-abundant OER/HER catalysts.

报告人简介：

Junyuan Xu obtained his BSc degree in Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT, Electrochemistry) in Jun. 2008. In Jan. 2014, he obtained his PhD degree from University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB) in Jan. 2014 supervised by Prof. Xindong Wang. During his PhD study, he went to Denmark as a one year Scientific Visitor at Technical University of Denmark (DTU) from Oct. 2011. His PhD project was on “High performance oxygen evolution reaction catalyst in acid for Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) water electrolysis. Starting on Mar. 2014, he became a postdoc research fellow at the Catalysis and Materials Division (CMD) of Institute of Metal Research (IMR) with Prof. Dangsheng Su as supervisor, where he focused on the electro-catalytic activity origin of carbon dioxide conversion using heteroatom doped nanocarbon as the electro-catalyst. After two years training, he joined the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) as a Critcat Project Research Fellow and will work on non-precious earth-abundant electrocatalysts for hydrogen/oxygen evolution and oxygen reduction reactions in Aug. 2016.