After two years of exploration, a research team from the School of Chemical Engineering at Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU) has proposed a simple fluoride-mediated stabilization and reconstruction strategy.

The newly developed catalyst increases hydrogen production from water electrolysis by five times compared to catalysts using precious metals, reducing voltage change during 1,200 hours of hydrogen production to 0.09 millivolts per hour. This achievement was recently published in Angewandte Chemie.

The team pre-embedded fluoride ions into the cobalt-based catalytic material to hold the cobalt element, enabling it to retain a relatively stable structure during the reconstruction process at the water-to-hydrogen anode, thereby ensuring good performance during long-term operation.

According to calculations, after adding fluoride to the cobalt-based catalytic material, the increase in voltage required for hydrogen production is only about 16 percent that of fluorine-free cobalt-based catalytic materials, and about 4 percent that of precious metal catalytic materials. This means that the new catalytic material will save electricity over extended operating cycles.

Based on rigorous data, the team's new strategy has created an ideal, regular, and disordered structure catalyst under the working conditions of the water electrolysis hydrogen production anode.

This research provides a new idea for accurately controlling catalyst reconstruction behavior under real working conditions and is of great significance for advancing the hydrogen energy industry.