Rational Design of Dynamic Interface Water Evolution on Turing Electrocatalyst toward the Industrial Hydrogen Production

Manipulating the structural and kinetic dissociation processes of water at the catalyst-electrolyte interface is vital for alkaline hydrogen evolution reactions (HER) at industrial current density. This is seldom actualized due to the intricacies of the electrochemical reaction interface. Herein, this work introduces a rapid, nonequilibrium cooling technique for synthesizing ternary Turing catalysts with short-range ordered structures (denoted as FeNiRu/C). These advanced structures empower the FeNiRu/C to exhibit excellent HER performance in 1 m KOH with an ultralow overpotential of 6.5 and 166.2 mV at 10 and 1000 mA cm-2, respectively, and a specific activity 7.3 times higher than that of Pt/C. Comprehensive mechanistic analyses reveal that abundant atomic species form asymmetric atomic electric fields on the catalyst surface inducing a directed evolution and the dissociation process of interfacial H2O molecules. In addition, the locally topologized structure effectively mitigates the high hydrogen coverage of the active site induced by the high current density. The establishment of the relationship between free water population and HER activity provides a new paradigm for the design of industrially relevant high performance alkaline HER catalysts. The introduction of an asymmetric atomic electric field at the catalyst-electrolyte interface can disrupt the hydrogen bonding network inherent in the electrolyte and thus manipulate the structure of H2O molecules and the dissociation process. Continuous replenishment of free H2O molecules and smaller H2O dissociation energy barrier ensures FeNiRu/C's exceptional hydrogen evolution activity (166.2 mV@1 A cm-2 in 1 m KOH and 187.1 mV@1 A cm-2 in seawater) at industrial current density. image