Electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution under neutral pH conditions: current understandings, recent advances, and future prospects
Hydrogen production from direct water electrolysis has long been pursued as a key that may revolutionize the hydrogen economy. With the rapid availability of electricity generated using renewable energy resources, this long-pursued target is now closer to reality than ever before. To date, most stud...
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| Published in | Energy & environmental science Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 3185 - 326 |
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| Main Authors | , , , , , |
| Format | Journal Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
Cambridge
Royal Society of Chemistry
01.01.2020
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| Subjects | |
| Online Access | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Hydrogen production from direct water electrolysis has long been pursued as a key that may revolutionize the hydrogen economy. With the rapid availability of electricity generated using renewable energy resources, this long-pursued target is now closer to reality than ever before. To date, most studies regarding electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) are carried out in strong acidic/alkali electrolytes. However, hydrogen production from HER under extreme pH conditions has several drawbacks, including a corrosive working environment, the requirement of expensive anion/cation exchange membranes, and acidic/alkali withstanding electrocatalysts. The more sustainable approach to address these drawbacks is to deploy neutral/near-neutral electrolytes for HER. Regretfully, both theoretical discussions and practical applications regarding HER under neutral/near-neutral conditions are relatively rare and very elusive. In this review, we systematically discuss the current understandings of HER mechanisms under neutral conditions and analyze the influences of different types of neutral electrolytes. The most recent advances in the development of neutral HER electrocatalysts are summarized and exemplified, and general electrocatalyst design principles are highlighted. Lastly, we provide our perspective on the potential future research direction. We hope that this review inspires future endeavors to realize efficient HER for hydrogen production under neutral conditions.
This review summarizes the latest advances in hydrogen evolution reaction under neutral conditions to enlighten future researches. |
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| Bibliography: | Zheng Zhou received his PhD degree from the school of Chemical & Biomolecule Engineering, the University of Sydney, Australia, in 2019. He is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Yuan Chen at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on catalyst design and energy conversion electrolysis, including metal-air batteries, transition metal-based electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution, oxygen reduction, oxygen evolution reactions, etc. Zengxia Pei received his PhD from City University of Hong Kong in 2017. Currently, he works as an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA) Fellow at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on the design and development of nanomaterials for sustainable energy conversion and storage in fields including electrocatalysis and aqueous batteries. Yuan Chen received a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University and a PhD from Yale University. He is a professor at The University of Sydney. His research focuses on carbon materials and their sustainable energy and environmental applications, including supercapacitors, batteries, electrocatalysts, membranes, and antibacterial coatings. He is a fellow of the Royal society of chemistry and institution of chemical engineers. He is currently serving as an editor for Carbon and Journal of Alloys and Compounds. ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 14 |
| ISSN: | 1754-5692 1754-5706 |
| DOI: | 10.1039/d0ee01856b |