Recently, Angewandte Chemie (a journal of the German Chemical Society), one of the prime chemistry journals in the world, has published a research article by the research group led by Prof. Shuifen Xie from HQU’s College of Materials Science & Engineering. The article was titled “Breaking Surface Atomic Monogeneity of Rh2P Nanocatalysts by Defect-Derived Phosphorus Vacancies for Efficient Alkaline Hydrogen Oxidation”, marking the breakthrough in the area of electrocatalysts.Rated as outstanding (top 5%) in the level of importance by the reviewers, the article was designated as a “Very Important Paper”.

Developing efficient Alkaline Hydrogen Oxidation can effectively alleviate the problems such as global energy shortage and pollution and plays a vital role in the utilization of hydrogen. Compared with the proton exchange membrane fuel cells(PEMFCs), the anion exchange membrane fuel cells(AEMFCs) can operate inan alkaline environment,and the oxygen reduction reaction(OOR) catalysts for their cathode help reduce the reliance on the expensive platinum-based catalysts. However, the hydrogen oxidation reaction(HOR) rate at the anode side in an alkaline environment is significantly lower than that in an acid medium. Therefore, developing efficient alkaline HOR electrocatalysts and revealing their reaction mechanisms are of great significance.

In recent years, transition metal phosphides have received an increasing attention in the study of hydrogen electrocatalysis due to its adequate hydrogen adsorption capacity. The paper published by the group reports a defect-derived strategy for creating surface phosphorous vacancies (P-vacancies) on nanometric Rh2P electrocatalysts toward drastically boosted electrocatalysis for alkaline hydrogen oxidation reaction (HOR). This strategy disrupts the monogeneity and atomic regularity of the thermodynamically stable P-terminated surfaces. The P-vacancies enable the exposure of sub-surface Rh atoms to act as exclusive H adsorption sites. The P-vacancies enable the exposure of sub-surface Rh atoms to act as exclusive H adsorption sites. Therein, the Had cooperates with the OHad on the peripheral P-sites to effectively accelerate the alkaline HOR. the P-vacancy-enriched d-Rh2P NWs catalyst exhibits extremely high catalytic activity and outstanding CO tolerance for alkaline HOR electrocatalysis, attaining 5.7 and 14.3 times mass activity that of p-Rh2P NCs and commercial Pt/C, respectively.

Advised by Prof. Shuifen Xie, the research paper was co-written by HQU’s PhD candidates Hongpu Huang(first author), Kai Liu(co-first author), Junlin Cai, Shupeng Wang and Master degree candidate Weizhen Chen. The theoretical calculation of the research was supported by Dr. Fulin Yang(co-corresponding author) at Yangzhou University. The research was sponsored by NSFC, Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province, Fujian Chemistry Alliance and Huaqiao University scientific research fund.

Link to the paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.202315752

（Editor: Wei Linying）