Electrocatalysis articles from across Nature Portfolio

Aqueous zinc-ion batteries are attractive due to their low cost, environmental friendliness, and exceptional performance, but the latter remains poorly understood. Now, a fast catalytic step involved in oxygen redox catalysis is shown to contribute to capacity at a high rate.

Unravelling the key parameters that govern the activity of oxygen evolution reaction catalysts is an essential step towards efficient production of green hydrogen. Now, the repulsion between adsorbates on the electrocatalyst surface has been identified as a powerful promoter for the rate-limiting O–O coupling step.

There is no doubt that identifying active sites at the atomic scale for designing optimal catalysts is a great challenge. Now, by combining computational and experimental results, an advanced methodology is proposed for understanding the structure–activity relationship at the atomic level.

Waste lithium-ion batteries and low-density polyethylene plastics present environmental issues. Herein, the authors demonstrate a synergistic pyrolysis approach for efficient and selective lithium extraction and upgrading of transition metal-carbon composites.

Platinum group metal-free electrocatalysts that utilize atomically dispersed, nitrogen-coordinated transition-metal sites in carbon are a promising replacement for platinum-based oxygen reduction reaction catalysts in fuel cells. This Perspective article offers a concise discussion on addressing remaining challenges related to activity–stability trade-offs by precisely controlling catalyst structures at multiple scales.

Designing efficient and stable electrocatalysts for water splitting is of great interest for H2 fuel production. Here, the authors present a Ru nanoparticle catalyst on TiN, achieving 20 A mg−1 Ru at 63 mV in alkaline conditions, and operating at 5 A cm−2 for over 1000 hours in an anion exchange membrane electrolyzer.

Electrochemistry offers tunable, cost effective and environmentally friendly alternatives to carry out redox reactions but the use of organoiodine compounds as electrocatalysts is largely underdeveloped. Here, the authors report an environmentally benign iodine(I/III) electrocatalytic platform for the in situ generation of dichloroiodoarenes for different reactions within a continuous flow setup.

Understanding the structure-function relationship in Cu-catalyzed CO₂ reduction is challenging due to dynamic active sites. This study introduces stable coordination polymer catalysts with homogenized, single-site Cu, enabling the study and tuning of C–C coupling efficiency in CO₂ electroreduction.

Since the first isolation of oxygen, chemists have explored oxygen reduction and evolution reactions. Now, computational chemists are trying to understand and predict the best catalysts for them. Here, the importance of various considerations for such calculations, as well as their challenges and opportunities, are discussed.

Aqueous zinc-ion batteries are attractive due to their low cost, environmental friendliness, and exceptional performance, but the latter remains poorly understood. Now, a fast catalytic step involved in oxygen redox catalysis is shown to contribute to capacity at a high rate.

Unravelling the key parameters that govern the activity of oxygen evolution reaction catalysts is an essential step towards efficient production of green hydrogen. Now, the repulsion between adsorbates on the electrocatalyst surface has been identified as a powerful promoter for the rate-limiting O–O coupling step.

There is no doubt that identifying active sites at the atomic scale for designing optimal catalysts is a great challenge. Now, by combining computational and experimental results, an advanced methodology is proposed for understanding the structure–activity relationship at the atomic level.

Green production of hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) with a sunlight-driven or renewable-energy-powered electrochemical process provides a path to its decentralized production and sustainable end-use. Here, we discuss how to develop a fairer basis for performance evaluation of (photo)electrosynthesis of H₂O₂.