Perovskite Oxides Toward Oxygen Evolution Reaction: Intellectual Design Strategies, Properties and Perspectives.

Developing electrochemical energy storage and conversion devices (e.g., water splitting, regenerative fuel cells and rechargeable metal-air batteries) driven by intermittent renewable energy sources holds a great potential to facilitate global energy transition and alleviate the associated environmental issues.

Theory-Guided Modulation of Optimal Silver Nanoclusters toward Efficient CO Electroreduction.

Electrochemical CO reduction reaction (CORR), when powered with intermittent but renewable energies, holds an attractive potential to close the anthropogenic carbon cycle through efficiently converting the exorbitantly discharged CO to value-added fuels and/or chemicals and consequently reduce the greenhouse gas emission. Through systematically integrating the density functional theory calculations, the modeling statistics of various proportions of CORR-preferred electroactive sites, and the theoretical work function results, it is found that the crystallographically unambiguous Ag nanoclusters (NCs) hold a high possibility to enable an outstanding CORR performance, particularly at an optimal size of around 2 nm. Motivated by this, homogeneously well-distributed ultrasmall Ag NCs with an average size of ∼2 nm (2 nm Ag NCs) were thus synthesized to electrochemically promote CORR, and the results demonstrate that the 2 nm Ag NCs are able to achieve a significantly larger CO partial current density [], an impressively higher CO Faraday efficiency of over 93.