A research team led by Prof. YAN Ya from the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with scientists from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the University of Auckland, has developed a highly stable and efficient water oxidation catalyst, marking a major advancement in the field of green hydrogen production via water splitting technology.
Their study was published in Science on April 25.
Water oxidation—where water molecules are split into oxygen gas, protons, and electrons—is a key half-reaction in electrolytic water splitting. However, it remains a bottleneck due to its high energy consumption and sluggish kinetics, requiring highly efficient catalysts to overcome these barriers. Although current transition metal-based catalysts exhibit good activity for alkaline water oxidation, they often degrade rapidly under industrial-level high current densities, primarily due to structural distortion and the dissolution of active metal sites under strong oxidative conditions.
