Understanding the role of dopants as a key step towards efficient oxygen evolution catalysts (WEAVE)
January 2022 – December 2025
Water electrolysis has since long been considered as a sustainable
and scalable technology to generate green hydrogen, which is a
promising candidate to store and liberate energy from. In order to
increase the overall energy efficiency of this process, it is important
to understand and improve the sluggish oxygen evolution reaction
(OER) by developing more efficient electrocatalysts. Crucial in this
search is the role dopants play in this process, as they severely
impact the activity and stability of the electrocatalyst which can result
in a positive or negative outcome. The main goal of this proposal is to
reveal the impact of dopants, electrode nanoscale structure and
microscale morphology on the stability of Ni-based OER
electrocatalysts. Understanding and controlling the mechanism and
processes behind the activity improvement caused by dopants of a
diverse set of Ni containing catalysts will be achieved by a
combination of high-end electrochemistry and (in-situ)
physicochemical characterization both in idealized environments as
continuous conditions. This will result in a complete understanding of
the dopant activation/degradation mechanism, which can then be
exploited to fine-tune and improve the proposed synthesis
approaches and develop state-of-the-art Ni-based OER
electrocatalysts that combine a high activity with a high stability.