Ce-Doped IrO Electrocatalysts with Enhanced Performance for Water Oxidation in Acidic Media.

Electrocatalytic water splitting in acidic media based on a proton-exchange membrane (PEM) is a promising technique for the large-scale production of hydrogen. However, developing electrocatalysts with high activity and excellent stability for an oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in acidic media is still a big challenge. Herein, a Ce-IrO catalyst supported on N-doped porous carbon (NPC) was developed via doping Ce into IrO nanoparticles. The Ce-IrO nanoparticles were uniformly distributed on NPC due to the high surface area. The optimized Ce-IrO@NPC delivers a low overpotential of 224 mV and excellent stability of 100 h in 0.5 M HSO at 10 mA cm. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations indicated that the introduction of Ce could modify the electronic structure of IrO, decreasing the energy barrier of the rate-determining step for OER and enhancing the electrochemical OER performance. Our work opens up a new way of developing anodic electrocatalysts, which can be stably applied in acidic media.