“导师大讲堂”第二十三讲：Development of Low Cost Electro-catalysts for Advanced Fuel Cells and Green Hydrogen Production from Water/Seawater Electrolyser (用于燃料电池和电解水制绿氢的低成本电催化研发)

    Electro-catalysis plays a key role in electrochemical energy conversion technologies such as fuel cells and water/seawater electrolysis for green hydrogen production. Liquid fuel cells such as direct methanol/(bio-)ethanol fuel cells have been regarded as a promising alternative for the power supply for portable and automotive applications thanks to their simplicity of using directly liquid fuels in the feed. Thefundamental key challenge in the advanced direct fuel cell and seawater electrolyser is to rationally design efficient, stable and low-cost catalysts. An insight into the structure-reactivity and structure-selectivity relationships is the prerequisite to the effective design of the desirable high-performance electrocatalysts. In this talk, recent progress on the development of low-cost electrocatalysts for both advanced direct fuel cells and seawater electrolyser for green hydrogen production will be reported. Fundamental studies have been performed, employing combined electrochemical in-situ FTIR spectroscopy and density functional theory (DFT) atomistic modeling, to understand the reaction mechanism and structure-reactivity relationships of a series of low-cost model and practical nano-catalysts, unsupported and supported on various substrates such as oxides and carbides. The effects of supports and electrode structures on catalyst layers towards alcohol oxidation and water/seawater splittingreactions (hydrogen evolution reaction and oxygen evolution reaction) have been demonstrated.