Understanding activity trends in electrochemical water oxidation to form hydrogen peroxide.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 28951571.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-017-00585-6 and PMC identifier 5615073.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Electrochemical production of hydrogen peroxide (H<sub>2</sub>O<sub>2</sub>) from water oxidation could provide a very attractive route to locally produce a chemically valuable product from an abundant resource. Herein using density functional theory calculations, we predict trends in activity for water oxidation towards H<sub>2</sub>O<sub>2</sub> evolution on four different metal oxides, i.e., WO<sub>3</sub>, SnO<sub>2</sub>, TiO<sub>2</sub> and BiVO<sub>4</sub>. The density functional theory predicted trend for H<sub>2</sub>O<sub>2</sub> evolution is further confirmed by our experimental measurements. Moreover, we identify that BiVO<sub>4</sub> has the best H<sub>2</sub>O<sub>2</sub> generation amount of those oxides and can achieve a Faraday efficiency of about 98% for H<sub>2</sub>O<sub>2</sub> production.Producing hydrogen peroxide via electrochemical oxidation of water is an attractive route to this valuable product. Here the authors theoretically and experimentally investigate hydrogen peroxide production activity trends for a range of metal oxides and identify the optimal bias ranges for high Faraday efficiencies.