Nanoarray based “superaerophobic” surfaces for gas evolution reaction electrodes

Abstract

Electrochemical gas evolution reactions are now of great importance in energy conversion processes and industries. Key to the improvement of catalytic performance lies the development of efficient catalytic electrodes. Besides the exploration of highly active catalysts, the fast removal of the gas products on the electrode surface should be realized because the adhered gas bubbles would block the following catalytic reactions and decrease the efficiency. In this paper, we introduce an ideal structure, a “superaerophobic” surface, to diminish the negative effects caused by the adhered gas bubbles. Several recent works focusing on addressing this issue are presented with the target reactions of hydrogen evolution and oxygen evolution. It is demonstrated that micro/nano-engineering of the catalyst directly on the current collector is a promising approach to minimize the negative effective induced by the gas bubble adhesion. In the last section, we also discuss the promise of this methodology for other energy related systems.