Electrochemical Scanning Tunneling Microscopy as a Tool for the Detection of Active Electrocatalytic Sites

To advance meaningful guidelines in the design of electrocatalytically active catalysts, a knowledge of the nature of active sites is the starting point. However, multiple factors such as material composition, site coordination, electrolyte effects, the support material, surface strain, and others i...

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Published inTopics in catalysis Vol. 66; no. 15-16; pp. 1270 - 1279
Main Authors Schmidt, Thorsten O., Haid, Richard W., Gubanova, Elena L., Kluge, Regina M., Bandarenka, Aliaksandr S.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Springer US 01.09.2023
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Catalysis
Characterization and Evaluation of Materials
Chemical reduction
Chemistry
Chemistry and Materials Science
Coordination
Hydrogen reduction
Industrial Chemistry/Chemical Engineering
Microscopy
Original Paper
Palladium
Pharmacy
Physical Chemistry
Scanning tunneling microscopy
In-situ method
Hydrogen evolution reaction
Palladium
Carbon
Active site
Electrochemical scanning tunneling microscopy
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Summary:To advance meaningful guidelines in the design of electrocatalytically active catalysts, a knowledge of the nature of active sites is the starting point. However, multiple factors such as material composition, site coordination, electrolyte effects, the support material, surface strain, and others influence catalytic behavior. Therefore, the identification of active sites can be complex. A substantial contributor can be in-situ experiments, which are able to identify active centers in a specific system while the reaction takes place. An example of such a technique is electrochemical scanning tunneling microscopy (EC-STM), which relates locally confined noise features to local electrocatalytic activity. In this work, we spotlight recent achievements of this technique with respect to palladium (Pd) surfaces for the hydrogen reduction reaction, where strain due to hydride formation comes into play in addition to surface coordination. Secondly, we demonstrate the high resolution of the technique on graphite-based surfaces. Here, edge sites are particularly active. Thus, with the EC-STM technique, we take strain effects (like on Pd) or effects of coordination (like on carbon) into account. Therefore, we can determine active sites with great accuracy under reaction conditions.
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ISSN:1022-5528
1572-9028
DOI:10.1007/s11244-023-01807-6