Benchmarking the Stability of Oxygen Evolution Reaction Catalysts: The Importance of Monitoring Mass Losses

• Because of the rising need for energy storage, potentially facilitatedby electrolyzers, improvements to the catalysis of theoxygen evolution reaction (OER) become increasingly relevant.Standardized protocols have been developed for determiningcritical figures of merit, such as the electrochemical surfacearea, mass activity and specific activity. Even so, when new andmore active catalysts are reported, the catalyst stability tendsto play a minor role. In this work, we monitor corrosion onRuO2 and MnOx by combining the electrochemical quartz crystalmicrobalance (EQCM) with inductively coupled plasma massspectrometry (ICP–MS). We show that a meaningful estimationof the stability cannot be achieved based on purely electrochemicaltests. On the catalysts tested, the anodic dissolutioncurrent was four orders of magnitude lower than the total current.We propose that even if long-term testing cannot be replaced,a useful evaluation of the stability can be achievedwith short-term tests by using EQCM or ICP–MS.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Kemi -- Fysikalisk kemi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Chemical Sciences -- Physical Chemistry (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Fysik -- Atom- och molekylfysik och optik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Physical Sciences -- Atom and Molecular Physics and Optics (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

art (subject category)

ref (subject category)