Fundamental Insights into the Oxygen Evolution Reaction from Epitaxial Oxide Thin Films

 Abstract : The intermittent nature of renewable energy sources requires a clean, scalable means of converting and storing energy. One Earth-abundant storage option is water electrolysis: storing energy in the bonds of O 2 and H 2 , and later extracting electricity by the electrochemical reaction of gasses in a fuel cell. The efficiency of this process is primarily limited by the sluggish kinetics of the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) at the anode, resulting in extensive use of precious metal IrO 2 electrocatalysts in current devices. I will share two approaches to mitigate this. The first is switching entirely to earth-abundant oxide materials as alternatives, where I will focus on nickel-based perovskites, building fundamental understanding of the electrode/electrolyte interface and its relation to catalyst electronic structure. The second is to reduce precious metal loading by stabilizing materials that are more active, but prone to oxidative dissolution, where I will focus on alloying in rutile RuO 2 -based catalysts. In both, we will leverage model oxide electrodes grown by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) that display a known crystallographic orientation, strain, surface area, and path for charge transport. Such measurements can establish the intrinsic activity of oxide catalysts in a way that cannot be realized with polydisperse nanoparticle systems, and we use these findings to rationally design composition and structure to maximize activity. 

Bio: Dr. Kelsey A. Stoerzinger is an Associate Professor in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. Stoerzinger started her career in 2018 at Oregon State University with a joint appointment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where she was a Linus Pauling Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow. She completed her doctoral studies in Materials Science and Engineering in 2016 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.