As a highly appealing technology for hydrogen generation, water electrolysis including oxygen evolution reaction (OER) at the anode and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) at the cathode largely depends on the availability of efficient electrocatalysts. Accordingly, over the past years, much effort has been made to develop various electrocatalysts with superior performance and reduced cost. Among them, ruthenium (Ru)-based materials for OER and HER are very promising because of their prominent catalytic activity, pH-universal application, the cheapest price among the precious metal family, and so on. Herein, recent advances in this hot research field are comprehensively reviewed. A general description about water splitting is presented to understand the reaction mechanism and proposed scaling relations toward activities, and key stability issues for Ru-based materials are further given. Subsequently, various Ru-involving electrocatalysts are introduced and classified into different groups for improving or optimizing electrocatalytic properties, with a special focus on several significant bifunctional electrocatalysts along with a simulated water electrolyzer. Finally, a perspective on the existing challenges and future progress of Ru-based catalysts toward OER and HER is provided. The main aim here is to shed some light on the design and construction of emerging catalysts for energy storage and conversion technologies.

Recent advances and prospective in ruthenium-based materials for electrochemical water splitting

Developing high-performance, low-cost, and robust bifunctional electrocatalysts for overall water splitting is extremely indispensable and challenging. It is a promising strategy to couple highly active precious metals with transition metals as efficient electrocatalysts, which can not only effectively reduce the cost of the preparation procedure, but also greatly improve the performance of catalysts through a synergistic effect. Herein, Ru and Ni nanoparticles embedded within nitrogen-doped carbon nanofibers (RuNi-NCNFs) are synthesized via a simple electrospinning technology with a subsequent carbonization process. The as-formed RuNi-NCNFs represent excellent Pt-like electrocatalytic activity for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in both alkaline and acidic conditions. Furthermore, the RuNi-NCNFs also exhibit an outstanding oxygen evolution reaction (OER) activity with an overpotential of 290 mV to achieve a current density of 10 mA cm-2 in alkaline electrolyte. Strikingly, owing to both the HER and OER performance, an electrolyzer with RuNi-NCNFs as both the anode and cathode catalysts requires only a cell voltage of 1.564 V to drive a current density of 10 mA cm-2 in an alkaline medium, which is lower than the benchmark of Pt/C||RuO2 electrodes. This study opens a novel avenue toward the exploration of high efficient but low-cost electrocatalysts for overall water splitting.

https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/advs.201901833

RuNi Nanoparticles Embedded in N-Doped Carbon Nanofibers as a Robust Bifunctional Catalyst for Efficient Overall Water Splitting.

Searching for a clean and renewable energy system is vital to alleviate the exacerbated environmental pollution problem while addressing the energy dilemma. With clean, renewable and high calorific value features, hydrogen has been identified as an ideal energy carrier to change the global energy structure and accomplish energy conversion in the future. A promising technique to generate hydrogen is water electrolysis, but rationally designing cost-effective and highly efficient catalysts to facilitate their widespread industrialization is still a formidable challenge. In the recent years, heterostructure materials have led to newer types of electrocatalysts owing to their unique physicochemical properties. Constructing heterostructures is regarded as a very important surface engineering aspect for the advancement of HER catalysts. Therefore, we present a review of the recent progress made in the fabrication of heterostructure materials toward HER in order to provide an insight into the catalytic properties of heterostructure catalysts. We start with the introduction of the HER mechanism and the evaluation standards for HER performance. Then, we summarize the synthetic strategies for preparing heterostructure catalysts as well as discussing their catalytic properties for HER. Finally, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for the future development of heterostructure catalysts from the perspectives of material design and synthesis.

Recent advancements in heterostructured interface engineering for hydrogen evolution reaction electrocatalysis

Ru-based electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction：Recent research advances and perspectives

Salt template-assisted in situ construction of Ru nanoclusters and porous carbon: excellent catalysts toward hydrogen evolution, ammonia-borane hydrolysis, and 4-nitrophenol reduction

Electrolysis of water needs high-efficiency catalysts to accelerate the kinetics of the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). A single catalyst is usually unable to simultaneously and effectively enhance all elementary steps of the HER. In this study, we demonstrate a novel triple-phase interface design that includes NiO and Ru nanoparticles on a porous nickel scaffold (PNS) to promote the Volmer and Heyrovsky steps, respectively. An in situ electro-oxidation route is developed to enable two catalysts along the interfaces to be directly wired with the metallic PNS. Because the hydrogen intermediates and electrons can be easily transported through the triple-phase interfaces, such a triple-phase interface structure exhibits highly efficient synergistic catalysis that is not observed in a conventional combination of two catalysts. The resultant electrocatalyst shows an overpotential of 39 mV at −10 mA cm−2 and a low Tafel slope of 75 mV dec−1 in 1 M KOH electrolyte, which are comparable to Pt/C and superior to other non-Pt electrocatalysts. Our studies demonstrated that interface construction of bifunctional catalysts can serve as an effective approach to promote the activities of non-Pt catalysts.

Enhanced synergistic catalysis by a novel triple-phase interface design of NiO/Ru@Ni for the hydrogen evolution reaction

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Enhanced synergistic catalysis by a novel triple-phase interface design of NiO/Ru@Ni for the hydrogen evolution reaction