4.8 Article

Green synthesis of water splitting electrocatalysts: IrO2 nanocages via Pearson's chemistry

Journal

CHEMICAL SCIENCE
Volume 13, Issue 40, Pages 11807-11816

Publisher

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/d2sc03640a

Keywords

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Funding

  1. CNRS-CEA METSA French network [FR CNRS 3507]
  2. French National Research Agency (ANR) [ANR-10-EQPX-45]
  3. Synchrotron SOLEIL [20201546]

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Highly porous iridium oxide nanostructured cages were synthesized using cheap Cu2O cubes as templates via a water-based process at room temperature. The resulting IrO2 hierarchical porous structures exhibited outstanding activity after calcination and acid leaching.
Highly porous iridium oxide structures are particularly well-suited for the preparation of porous catalyst layers needed in proton exchange membrane water electrolyzers. Herein, we report the formation of iridium oxide nanostructured cages, via a water-based process performed at room temperature, using cheap Cu2O cubes as the template. In this synthetic approach, based on Pearson's hard and soft acid-base theory, the replacement of the Cu2O core by an iridium shell is permitted by the difference in hardness/softness of cations and anions of the two reactants Cu2O and IrCl3. Calcination followed by acid leaching allow the removal of residual copper oxide cores and leave IrO2 hierarchical porous structures with outstanding activity toward the oxygen evolution reaction. Fundamental understanding of the reaction steps and identification of the intermediates are permitted by coupling a set of ex situ and in situ techniques including operando time-resolved X-ray absorption spectroscopy during the synthesis.

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