Perspective on High-Rate Alkaline Water Splitting

Alkaline water splitting (AWS) represents a sustainable technology for hydrogen gas generation. In comparison to proton exchange membrane water splitting, AWS is an economical approach because non-platinum-group metal-based materials can be used as catalysts and it avoids the usage of expensive proton exchange membranes. Despite the rapid development of cost-effective and intrinsically active catalysts that showed record-breaking performances at low current density (tens of mA cm(-2)), the cell efficiency of AWS at large current density (>400 mA cm(-2)) is still limited. In this Perspective, we aim to share our thoughts on the design of hydrogen evolution and oxygen evolution catalysts for high-rate AWS, the possible problems in catalyst's performance evaluation, and the stability issues of catalysts.

Automated summary

Alkaline water splitting (AWS) is a sustainable technology utilizing economical materials as catalysts and avoiding the use of expensive membranes. Despite the existence of efficient catalysts, the efficiency of AWS at large current density is still limited.