High-Throughput Bubble Screening Method for Combinatorial Discovery of Electrocatalysts for Water Splitting

Combinatorial synthesis and screening for discovery of electrocatalysts has received increasing attention, particularly for energy-related technologies. High-throughput discovery strategies typically employ a fast, reliable initial screening technique that is able to identify active catalyst composition regions. Traditional electrochemical characterization via current-voltage measurements is inherently throughput-limited, as such measurements are most readily performed by serial screening. Parallel screening methods can yield much higher throughput and generally require the use of an indirect measurement of catalytic activity. In a water-splitting reaction, the change of local pH or the presence of oxygen and hydrogen in the solution can be utilized for parallel screening of active electrocatalysts. Previously reported techniques for measuring these signals typically function in a narrow pH range and are not suitable for both strong acidic and basic environments. A simple approach to screen the electrocatalytic activities by imaging the oxygen and hydrogen bubbles produced by the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is reported here. A custom built electrochemical cell was employed to record the bubble evolution during the screening, where the testing materials were subject to desired electrochemical potentials. The transient of the bubble intensity obtained from the screening was quantitatively analyzed to yield a bubble figure of merit (FOM) that represents the reaction rate. Active catalysts in a pseudoternary material library, (Ni-Fe-Co)O-x, which contains 231 unique compositions, were identified in less than one minute using the bubble screening method. An independent, serial screening method on the same material library exhibited excellent agreement with the parallel bubble screening. This general approach is highly parallel and is independent of solution pH.