Engineering Nanostructured Materials for High Performance Electrocatalysis

Nanostructured materials hold great promise for a large number of electrocatalytic reactions. In this presentation, I will briefly review the activities and efforts of our research group on engineering nanomaterials for electrocatalysis within the last two years. Several promising materials will be demonstrated as examples and their electrocatalytic activities toward hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) and CO₂ reduction reaction (CO2RR) will be discussed in detail, with an emphasis on understanding their structure-property relationships. In particular, I will introduce our recent discovery of Pt-Ni(OH)₂-graphene ternary hybrid materials as a MOR electrocatalyst with high activity and recording-breaking durability, and CoPPc-CNT hybrid materials as a CO2RR electrocatalyst to selectively reduce CO₂ to CO at low overpotential, with high Faradaic efficiency and TOF.