Accelerating the Discovery of Metastable IrO₂ for the Oxygen Evolution Reaction by the Self-Learning-Input Graph...

The discovery of active and stable catalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is vital to improve water electrolysis. To date, rutile iridium dioxide IrO₂ is the only known OER catalyst in the acidic solution, while its poor activity restricts its practical viability. Herein, we propose a universal graph neural network, namely, CrystalGNN, and introduce a dynamic embedding layer to self-update atomic inputs during the training process. Based on this framework, we train a model to accurately predict the formation energies of 10,500 IrO₂ configurations and discover 8 unreported metastable phases, among which C2/m-IrO₂ and P62-IrO₂ are identified as excellent electrocatalysts to reach the theoretical OER overpotential limit at their most stable surfaces. Our self-learning-input CrystalGNN framework exhibits reliable accuracy, generalization, and transferring ability and successfully accelerates the bottom-up catalyst design of novel metastable IrO₂ to boost the OER activity.