RAISE: CET: Dynamic Ferroelectric Support Interactions to Transform Hydrogen Electrocatalysis

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

This Research Advanced by Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (RAISE) award is made in response to Dear Colleague Letter 23-109, as part of the NSF-wide Clean Energy Technology initiative. Catalysts are used to drive the chemical reactions that make most of the materials that society uses. While catalysts are well developed for the processing of petrochemicals, the deployment of clean energy technologies demands innovation to develop new catalysts. In particular, the production of hydrogen from splitting water using electrical energy can be catalyzed, but today hydrogen production from water typically uses catalysts such as platinum that are rare and expensive. This research will advance fundamental knowledge to enhance the rate with which hydrogen can be produced from water splitting reactions. A potentially critical benefit of the work is to enable the use of catalysts that are not precious metals, so that if the project is successful technologies built upon it will not be limited by costly, scarce catalysts. Beyond hydrogen conversion, the underlying knowledge gained regarding how catalysts facilitate chemical reactions may find wide application in catalysis for clean energy technologies. Because hydrogen involves forming a single bond between just two atoms, it can serve as a model catalytic system for study while also being critical to future clean energy technologies. This work on the catalytic production of hydrogen will provide research training to students on the project in combining computational and experimental methods and in soft-skills scientific communication bridging between theory and experiment. Throughout, the project will integrate research and education about reaction dynamics into undergraduate and graduate curricula and promote the development of a diverse research workforce. A small annual workshop will provide an extended forum to share project research on dynamic catalysis with a mix of junior scientists and researchers from the broader materials design and catalysis community. The workshop’s goals include the training and professional development of a diverse set of researchers in computational and experimental materials and catalyst design. This project develops catalysts that exhibit multiple adsorbate binding energies to enable the systematic investigation of dynamic catalysis, with a focus on hydrogen evolving catalysts. Dynamic catalysis of aqueous hydrogen evolution is a distinct fundamental approach to electrochemical hydrogen production, a clean energy technology critical to a future hydrogen economy. The project evolves a closed-loop cycle of learning that integrates first-principles mechanistic understanding and catalyst design, modeling of time-dependent surface reactions, surface-sensitive spectroscopy, and experimental electrocatalysis to design, test, and analyze the operation of catalysts surfaces in the dynamic catalysis paradigm. The project will use well-defined, epitaxial thin film catalysts for dynamic electrocatalysis experiments, providing realistic constructs for evaluating the ab-initio modeling predictions and model surfaces for surface spectroscopy, maximizing learning between theory and experiment. Hydrogen evolution also serves as a model electrochemical reaction, providing the best opportunity to gain mechanistic understanding of dynamic effects on activity. Developing new pathways to enable active and potentially precious-metal-free electrocatalysis of hydrogen is societally important for bolstering the deployment of electrolyzers and fuel cells. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.