Tuning Electrocatalytic Activities of Dealloyed Nanoporous Catalysts by Macroscopic Strain Engineering

It is technically challenging to quantitatively apply strains to tune catalysis because most heterogeneous catalysts are nanoparticles, and lattice strains can only be applied indirectly via core-shell structures or crystal defects. Herein, we report quantitative relations between macroscopic strains and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) activities of dealloyed nanoporous gold (NPG) by directly applying macroscopic strains upon bulk NPG. It was found that macroscopic compressive strains lead to a decrease, while macroscopic tensile strains improve the HER activity of NPG, which is in line with the d-band center model. The overpotential and onset potential of HER display approximately a linear relation with applied macroscopic strains, revealing an ∼2.9 meV decrease of the binding energy per 0.1% lattice strains from compressive to tensile. The methodology with the high strain sensitivity of electrocatalysis, developed in this study, paves a new way to investigate the insights of strain-dependent electrocatalysis with high precision.