Recent advances in spinel-type electrocatalysts for bifunctional oxygen reduction and oxygen evolution reactions

The demand for efficient and environmentally-benign electrocatalysts that help availably harness the renewable energy resources is growing rapidly. In recent years, increasing insights into the design of water electrolysers, fuel cells, and metal–air batteries emerge in response to the need for developing sustainable energy carriers, in which the oxygen evolution reaction and the oxygen reduction reaction play key roles. However, both reactions suffer from sluggish kinetics that restricts the reactivity. Therefore, it is vital to probe into the structure of the catalysts to exploit high-performance bifunctional oxygen electrocatalysts. Spinel-type catalysts are a class of materials with advantages of versatility, low toxicity, low expense, high abundance, flexible ion arrangement, and multivalence structure. In this review, we afford a basic overview of spinel-type materials and then introduce the relevant theoretical principles for electrocatalytic activity, following that we shed light on the structure–property relationship strategies for spinel-type catalysts including electronic structure, microstructure, phase and composition regulation, and coupling with electrically conductive supports. We elaborate the relationship between structure and property, in order to provide some insights into the design of spinel-type bifunctional oxygen electrocatalysts.