Mesoporous RuO2-based Binary Oxide Catalyst for Oxygen Evolution Reaction by Nano-Replication Method

Abstract

As increasing the renewable generation for electricity using wind and photovoltaic, the hydrogen production using polymer electrolyte membrane water electrolyzer (PEMWE) has been attracting a great interest to overcome of inherent intermittency of renewable electricity [1]. In addition, the PEMWE hold some advantages over the traditional alkaline electrolyzers, such as (a) high efficiency at high current density, (b) the load following ability, (c) solid acidic electrolytes, and (d) a fast startup time [2]. Among the electrocatalytic reaction of the PEMWE, the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) at the anode takes place at the significantly high overpotential. For this reason, the catalysts towards OER has been widely investigated and developed for many decades in order to enhance the efficiency of PEMWE. To improve the activity and stability of the OER catalyst, Ir and Ru based catalysts have been intensively investigated by increasing the surface area and formation of binary oxide, etc. [1-5]. In this presentation, the ordered binary mesoporous oxide based on ruthenium oxide catalysts for OER are prepared through a hard-template method using ordered 3-dimensional mesoporous silica KIT-6 [6]. Through this method, the catalysts with a very high surface area over than 100 m2/g with ordered mesopore are obtained. By the addition of 5wt.% of Sn into the mesoporous RuO2, the overpotentials for OER is decreased from the 290 mV for mesoporous RuO2 to 260 mV, respectively, at 10 mA/cm2 under the acid condition, which showed much higher OER activity compared to the commercial RuO2 material. This work supported by KEPCO (No. CX 72170124) and GRI grant funded by GIST