Understanding activity trends in electrochemical water oxidation to form hydrogen peroxide.

Electrochemical production of hydrogen peroxide (HO) from water oxidation could provide a very attractive route to locally produce a chemically valuable product from an abundant resource. Herein using density functional theory calculations, we predict trends in activity for water oxidation towards HO evolution on four different metal oxides, i.e., WO, SnO, TiO and BiVO. The density functional theory predicted trend for HO evolution is further confirmed by our experimental measurements. Moreover, we identify that BiVO has the best HO generation amount of those oxides and can achieve a Faraday efficiency of about 98% for HO production.Producing hydrogen peroxide via electrochemical oxidation of water is an attractive route to this valuable product. Here the authors theoretically and experimentally investigate hydrogen peroxide production activity trends for a range of metal oxides and identify the optimal bias ranges for high Faraday efficiencies.