期刊名称:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN:0027-8424
电子版ISSN:1091-6490
出版年度:2018
卷号:115
期号:23
页码:5872-5877
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1722034115
语种:English
出版社:The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要:The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is critical to solar production of fuels, but the reaction mechanism underlying the performance for a best OER catalyst, Fe-doped NiOOH [(Ni,Fe)OOH], remains highly controversial. We used grand canonical quantum mechanics to predict the OER mechanisms including kinetics and thus overpotentials as a function of Fe content in (Ni,Fe)OOH catalysts. We find that density functional theory (DFT) without exact exchange predicts that addition of Fe does not reduce the overpotential much. However, DFT with exact exchange predicts dramatic improvement in performance for (Ni,Fe)OOH, leading to an overpotential of 0.42 V and a Tafel slope of 23 mV/decade (dec), in good agreement with experiments, 0.3–0.4 V and 30 mV/dec. We reveal that the high spin