4.6 Article

Unravelling the origin of bifunctional OER/ORR activity for single-atom catalysts supported on C2N by DFT and machine learning

Journal

JOURNAL OF MATERIALS CHEMISTRY A
Volume 9, Issue 31, Pages 16860-16867

Publisher

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/d1ta04256d

Keywords

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Funding

  1. Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China [PolyU152140/19E]
  2. Hong Kong Polytechnic University [YW5B, YWA1]
  3. National Natural Science Foundation of China [11804286]
  4. Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [19lgpy263]
  5. Scientific and Technical Innovation Action Plan (Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan Science & Technology Cooperation Project of Shanghai Science and Technology Committee) [19160760600]

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This study showcases the promising bifunctional OER/ORR catalytic performance of single-atom catalysts supported on the C2N monolayer, with Rh@C2N, Au, and Pd@C2N demonstrating superior activity. The origin of this catalytic activity is revealed through DFT calculations and ML modelling, shedding light on the underlying mechanisms and element-specific activity.
Designing high-performance bifunctional oxygen evolution/reduction reaction (OER/ORR) catalysts is a newly emerging topic and these catalysts have wide applications in metal-air batteries and fuel cells. Herein, we report a group of (27) single-atom catalysts (SACs) supported on the C2N monolayer as promising bifunctional OER/ORR catalysts by theoretical calculations. In particular, Rh@C2N exhibits a lower OER overpotential (0.37 V) than the IrO2(110) benchmark with good ORR activity, while Au and Pd@C2N are superior ORR catalysts (with an overpotential of 0.38 and 0.40 V) to Pt(111) and their OER performance is also outstanding. More importantly, we discover the origin of the bifunctional catalytic activity by density functional theory (DFT) calculations and machine learning (ML). Using DFT, we find a volcano-shaped relationship between the catalytic activity and Delta G(O), and finally link them to the normalized Fermi abundance, a parameter based on the electronic structure analysis. We further unravel the origin of element-specific activity by ML modelling based on the random forest algorithm that considers the outer electron number and oxide formation enthalpy as the two most important factors, and our model can give an accurate prediction of Delta G(O) with much reduced time and cost. This work not only paves the way for understanding the origin of bifunctional OER/ORR activity of SACs, but also benefits the rational design of novel SACs for other catalytic reactions by combining DFT and ML.

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