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Recent progress and prospect of carbon-free single-site catalysts for the hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions

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Abstract

The key challenge for scalable production of hydrogen from water lies in the rational design and preparation of high-performance and earth-abundant electrocatalysts to replace precious metal Pt and IrO2 for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Although atomic M-N-C materials have been extensively studied in heterogeneous catalysis field, the insufficient antioxidant capacity of carbonous substrates hinders their practical application in OER. Develo** highly active and stable OER electrocatalysts is the key for electrochemical water splitting. This review presents feasible design strategies for fabricating carbon-free single-site catalysts and their applications in HER/OER and overall water splitting. The constitutive relationships between structure, composition, and catalytic performance for HER and OER are detailly discussed, providing ponderable insights into rationally constructing high-performance HER and OER electrocatalysts. The perspectives on the challenges and future research orientations in single-site catalysts for electrochemical water splitting are suggested.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 22075099), and Natural Science Foundation of Jilin Province (No. 20180101291JC).

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  1. Institute of Physical Chemistry, College of Chemistry, Jilin University, 2519 Jiefang Road, Changchun, 130021, China

    **gqi Guan, Xue Bai & Tianmi Tang

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Guan, J., Bai, X. & Tang, T. Recent progress and prospect of carbon-free single-site catalysts for the hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions. Nano Res. 15, 818–837 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-021-3680-9

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