Electronic state reconfiguration induced by structural deformation at ultrathin non-van der Waals metal oxides to accelerate oxygen evolution reaction

Abstract

Electrochemical water splitting plays a critical role in developing new-type energy conversion devices, but has to face the technological bottleneck of slow anodic oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Herein, we propose an intriguing structural deformation strategy to reconfigure the electronic states at the ultrathin non-van der Waals metal oxides for facilitating the reaction kinetics of OER, in which half-filling 3d orbitals at magnetic sites will be more localized by compressive deformation and then enforce their bonding interaction and charge transfer with the intermediates. Compared with the traditional bulk materials surfaces, these ultrathin non-van der Waals metal oxides show reactive activity more sensitive to the external strain, because they have stronger interatomic interactions. The relevant analysis about d-band center and work functions all demonstrate that the exfoliation of non-van de Waals catalysts from their bulk materials have obvious advantage in improving the reactive activity.