Enabling Efficient Oxygen Evolution via Anchoring Carbon-Layer-Confined RuO on a Well-Matched Substrate.

Oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is a multistep proton-coupled four-electron process with sluggish kinetics, which seriously limits the hydrogen production efficiency, thus it is of great importance to develop an efficient and stable OER catalyst. In this study, a two-step differential pyrolysis strategy is employed to design a three-dimensional porous microstructured material consisting of RuO nanoparticles coated by a thin-layer carbon, where the active particles were isolated in separate chambers and the RuO nanoparticles mainly existed in the form of a heterogeneous interface between RuO and partial metallic Ru. The preparation parameters of the catalysts are optimized via combining transient and steady-state polarization properties, and the target catalyst Cat-500-1.