Metal–Oxygen Bond Ionicity as an Efficient Descriptor for Doped NiOOH Photocatalytic Activity

Abstract The computational design of solid catalysts has become a very “hot” field during the last decades, especially with the recent increase in computational tool performance. However, theoretical techniques are still very time demanding because they require the consideration of many adsorption configurations of the reaction intermediates on the surface. Herein, we propose to use the metal–oxygen (M−O) bond ionicity as a descriptor for the photocatalytic activity of one of the best catalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Ionicity is a bulk property and thus carries the advantage of being easily obtainable from a simple Bader charge analysis by using density functional theory (DFT). We will show that this criterion can be used successfully to design efficient dopants for NiOOH material. This catalyst is known to exhibit interesting photoelectrochemical properties for OER if it is doped with specific transition metals. Finally, we demonstrate that other electronic properties that relate to bulk calculation, such as oxidation states and density of states, are not alone sufficient to explain the photocatalytic activity of the material. Thus, M−O bond ionicity attracts significant interest compared with other bulk observables obtained by using DFT computations.