Experimental Sabatier plot for predictive design of active and stable Pt-alloy oxygen reduction reaction catalysts

A critical technological roadblock to the widespread adoption of proton-exchange membrane fuel cells is the development of highly active and durable platinum-based catalysts for accelerating the sluggish oxygen reduction reaction, which has largely relied on anecdotal discoveries so far. While the oxygen binding energy ∆EO has been frequently used as a theoretical descriptor for predicting the activity, there is no known descriptor for predicting durability. Here we developed a binary experimental descriptor that captures both the strain and Pt transition metal coupling contributions through X-ray absorption spectroscopy and directly correlated the binary experimental descriptor with the calculated ∆EO of the catalyst surface. This leads to an experimentally validated Sabatier plot to predict both the catalytic activity and stability for a wide range of Pt-alloy oxygen reduction reaction catalysts. Based on the binary experimental descriptor, we further designed an oxygen reduction reaction catalyst wherein high activity and stability are simultaneously achieved. The widespread adoption of fuel cells requires exhaustive screening for highly active and durable Pt-based catalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction. Now a binary descriptor based on experimental parameters extracted from X-ray absorption spectroscopy is used to predict the catalytic activity and stability of a wide range of Pt-alloy catalysts.