Experimental investigation of NixFe1-xOOH and CoxFe1-xOOH in electrocatalytic oxidation of seawater and Python-based simulation of cyclic voltammograms
By: Anneke Moeller
Department: Chemistry
Faculty Advisors: Dr. Jingjing Qiu and Dr. Nicole Adelstein
Electrocatalytic water splitting is one promising approach to generate clean energy – hydrogen gas (H2). Of the two half reactions in water electrolysis, oxygen evolution reaction (OER) limits the overall efficiency. Nickel (Ni), cobalt (Co) and iron (Fe) based electrocatalysts can effectively catalyze the OER process in alkaline electrolytes. Pure water is a scarce resource. This could limit the use of purified water in large-scale electrolysis as an approach for energy storage. With sea water making up the majority of the water sources on our planet, it could be an alternative for electrocatalytic water splitting. However, sea water differs from purified water sources owing to the presence of sodium chloride (NaCl). The four-electron OER process, compared to the two-electron chloride oxidation, has very high overpotential and this makes OER kinetically unfavorable. This project investigates the effects of electro-oxidation of Cl- on the electrocatalytic activities of the OER electrocatalysts, NixFe1-xOOH and CoxFe1-xOOH electrocatalysts. The concentrations of Cl- will be varied and additional computational work has been conducted to simulate the cyclic voltammograms of redox couples to further elucidate the electron transfer process.