Zhifeng Ren
University of Houston, USA
Title: High performance catalysts for hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions and water electrolysis
Biography
Biography: Zhifeng Ren
Abstract
Water electrolysis for hydrogen production is very important but not effi cient due to high cost of the noble metal containing catalysts or low performance of the non noble metal based catalysts. Water electrolysis involves hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). HER catalysts are normally good only in acid and OER catalysts only in base, but none of them are good in both acid and base or bi-functional for both HER and OER, which makes the overall water electrolysis not effi cient. We recently discovered some catalysts better than the noble metal containing ones in both acid and base, which made the overall water electrolysis more effi cient than the noble metal containing catalysts. In this talk, the author will present a few examples on their recent discovery on new catalysts to achieve water splitting for current density larger than 500 mA/cm2 at less than 1.7 V.