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Published January 3, 2025 | Published
Journal Article Metadata-only

Tantalum-stabilized ruthenium oxide electrocatalysts for industrial water electrolysis

Zhang, Jiahao1, 2 ORCID icon
Fu, Xianbiao2 ORCID icon
Kwon, Soonho3 ORCID icon
Chen, Kaifeng2
Liu, Xiaozhi4 ORCID icon
Yang, Jin5
Sun, Haoran5
Wang, Yanchang6 ORCID icon
Uchiyama, Tomoki6 ORCID icon
Uchimoto, Yoshiharu6 ORCID icon
Li, Shaofeng7 ORCID icon
Li, Yan8 ORCID icon
Fan, Xiaolong9
Chen, Gong10 ORCID icon
Xia, Fanjie11
Wu, Jinsong11 ORCID icon
Li, Yanbo2 ORCID icon
Yue, Qin2 ORCID icon
Qiao, Liang2 ORCID icon
Su, Dong4 ORCID icon
Zhou, Hua8 ORCID icon
Goddard, William A.3 ORCID icon
Kang, Yijin1 ORCID icon
  • 1. ROR icon Sichuan University
  • 2. ROR icon University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
  • 3. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 4. ROR icon Institute of Physics
  • 5. ROR icon Dongfang Electric Corporation (China)
  • 6. ROR icon Kyoto University
  • 7. ROR icon Technical University of Denmark
  • 8. ROR icon Argonne National Laboratory
  • 9. ROR icon Lanzhou University
  • 10. ROR icon Nanjing University
  • 11. ROR icon Wuhan University of Technology

Abstract

The iridium oxide (IrO2) catalyst for the oxygen evolution reaction used industrially (in proton exchange membrane water electrolyzers) is scarce and costly. Although ruthenium oxide (RuO2) is a promising alternative, its poor stability has hindered practical application. We used well-defined extended surface models to identify that RuO2 undergoes structure-dependent corrosion that causes Ru dissolution. Tantalum (Ta) doping effectively stabilized RuO2 against such corrosion and enhanced the intrinsic activity of RuO2. In an industrial demonstration, Ta-RuO2 electrocatalyst exhibited stability near that of IrO2 and had a performance decay rate of ~14 microvolts per hour in a 2800-hour test. At current densities of 1 ampere per square centimeter, it had an overpotential 330 millivolts less than that of IrO2.

Copyright and License

© 2025 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.

Acknowledgement

This work is primarily supported by Y.K.’s personal funds and resources, through Tianrui Technology Co., LTD. Computational work was supported by the Liquid Sunlight Alliance—which is supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Fuels from Sunlight Hub under award no. DE-SC0021266 (W.A.G.) and by an individual fellowship from the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech (S.K.)—and used Stampede3 at Texas Advanced Computing Center through allocation DMR160114 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by NSF grants 2138259, 2138286, 2138307, 2137603, and 2138296 (W.A.G.). This research used beamline 33-ID-D of the Advanced Photon Source, a DOE Office of Science user facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under contract no. DE-AC02-06CH11357. This research used beamline 4-ID of the National Synchrotron Light Source II, a DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Brookhaven National Laboratory under contract no. DE-SC0012704.

Contributions

Y.K. provided all the resources through Tianrui Tech and supervised the project. J.Z and Y.K. designed the experiment. J.Z. and X.F. performed the synthesis, characterization, and electrochemical tests. S.K. and W.A.G. carried out the theoretical calculations. K.C., L.Q., X.F., and Y.L. prepared the thin-films. X.L, F.X., J.W. and D.S. performed electron microscopy. J.Y. and H.S. facilitated the industrial tests. Y.W., T.U., Y.U., S.L., Y.L. and H.Z. are beam scientists who assisted in spectroscopy. G.C. performed the low energy electron microscopy. Y.K., J.Z., S.K., and W.A.G. drafted the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and wrote the paper.

Conflict of Interest

Y.K. through Tianrui Tech Co., LTD, commercialized the electrocatalysts described herein and holds the related patents. DongFang Boiler Group Co., LTD, is a megawatt water electrolyzer manufacturer and an energy solution provider.

Data Availability

All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper or the Supplementary Materials. The DFT data are available at Zenodo: W. A. Goddard III, S. Kwon, DFT Geometry and Energy, Version 1.0.0, Zenodo (2024); https://www.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14048116.

 
 

Additional details

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