R-004

Milutin Smiljanić

milutin.smiljanic@ki.si

Ivan Marić, Aleksandra Popović, Marjan Bele, Nejc Hodnik

National Institute of Chemistry, Slovenia

Synergizing Metal-Support Interaction and Bimetallic Nanostructures: A Pathway to Efficient Electrocatalysts

The excessive use of fossil fuels has led to serious consequences for the environment, including climate change and the deterioration of human health. Therefore, there is an urgent need for sustainable energy solutions and innovation. The concept of hydrogen energy, proposed over 50 years ago, involves the use of hydrogen as the main energy vector instead of fossil fuels. Currently, hydrogen production releases significant amounts of greenhouse gases as it relies mainly on carbon-intensive technologies like coal gasification and methane steam reforming. Water electrolysis is a key technology for carbon-neutral hydrogen production, but its commercialization is hampered by the high cost and scarcity of advanced electrocatalysts such as Pt/C for the hydrogen evolution reaction and IrOx for the oxygen evolution reaction. Therefore, breakthroughs in the development of alternative, lower cost catalytic materials with equal or ideally better performance would enable progress in the widespread use of water electrolysis technology for green hydrogen production. 

In this study, innovative Ru-based catalysts deposited on a titanium oxynitride–carbon (TiON-C) support are investigated. Due to the metal-support interaction (MSI) provided by the TiON support, the Ru/TiON-C composite showed superior mass activity and metal utilization for both water splitting reactions compared to commercial Pt/C and IrOx benchmarks, providing a promising platform for cost-effective, high-performance electrocatalysts. To further its performance, we modified Ru/TiON-C by adding small amounts of Pt and Ir, and both RuPt and RuIr nanostructures showed excellent functionality in water splitting reactions. These results can be attributed to the synergy between MSI and bimetallic nanostructures leading to uniquely designed active sites. The presented approach can be used for the development of catalysts for various electrochemical reactions.