Nature Energy, Hao Ming Chen, oxygen evolution reaction (OER), electrocatalyst, X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS)
NSRRC User Hao Ming Chen’s Collaborative Research Published in Nature Energy
2021/12/08
An international collaborative team led by Prof. Hao Ming Chen, Department of Chemistry at National Taiwan University, and Prof. Xile Hu, Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, conducted research by using NSRRC facilities and had their research results published in Nature Energy. Prof. Chen is an adjunct scientist of the NSRRC. He has not only adopted NSRRC experimental facilities widely as an advantageous tool to his research, but also been recognized for his outstanding research with the 2021 NSRRC Outstanding Paper Award. In this research, the team used TPS 44A, TLS 01C1, as well as two Taiwan-contracted beamlines, BL12B2 and BL12XU, located at SPring-8 in Japan, to perform X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) experiments.
In the research, the team reveals a unique mechanism of the double-atom catalysts as a molecular platform for heterogeneous oxygen evolution electrocatalysis. They find a general synthesis of Co-, Fe- and Ni-containing double-atom catalysts from their single-atom precursors via in situ electrochemical transformation. With in-situ XAS and high energy resolution XAS, characterization reveals molecule-like bimetallic active sites for these catalysts. Their work demonstrates double-atom catalysts as an attractive platform, not only for effective structural analysis of active sites for the catalysts during OER, but also for fundamental studies of heterogeneous oxygen evolution electrocatalysts.
