Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 10, 2026

Author Spotlight: Design and Evaluation of Au-Electroplated Carbon Fiber Cloth Electrodes for Hydrogen Peroxide Fuel Cells
Published on: October 20, 2023
Rational Design and Dynamic Ru Exsolution Enables Active Heterostructures Surpassing Pt for Alkaline Hydrogen
Liuchen Wang1, Bing Li1, Mingyu Li2
1School of Environment and Energy, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China.
None:
Accelerating the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is essential for improving water electrolysis efficiency with renewable energy, ensuring a sustainable hydrogen economy. Heterostructure catalysts show promise in significantly enhancing alkaline HER by facilitating both water dissociation and hydrogen generation, but the rational design and synthesis of robust and active heterostructures remains challenging. Here, we correlate the bias-driven dynamic surface reconstruction of ruthenate perovskites with their O 2p band center to design exsolved Ru/perovskite heterostructures for highly efficient alkaline HER. BaRuO3 is used as a model because its O 2p band center is closest to the Fermi level, allowing facile surface reconstruction under HER conditions. This results in exsolved Ru on BaRuO3 with rich oxygen vacancies, as confirmed by microscopy and spectroscopy, including in situ Ru exsolution over time under transmission electron microscopy observation. The target heterostructure shows approximately 120-fold enhancement in HER activity after surface reconstruction, with a mass activity of ∼ 1.68 times higher than commercial Pt/C at an overpotential of 80 mV. We reveal that perovskite oxides facilitate water dissociation and the exsolved Ru promotes hydrogen generation. Moreover, this bias-driven dynamic reconstruction strategy is applicable to other perovskite oxides. These findings provide guidelines for the rational design of efficient heterostructure electrocatalysts and identify the electronic structure descriptor for oxide catalyst exsolution behavior.
Related Concept Videos
Reduction of Alkenes: Asymmetric Catalytic Hydrogenation
The metal catalyst used can be either heterogeneous or homogeneous. When hydrogenation of an alkene generates a chiral center, a pair of enantiomeric products is expected to form. However, an enantiomeric excess of one of the products can be facilitated using an enantioselective reaction or an...
Radical Formation: Abstraction
Even though homolysis produces radicals, it is different from radical...
Catalysis
Reduction of Alkenes: Catalytic Hydrogenation
Metals like palladium, platinum, and nickel are commonly used in their solid forms — fine powder on an inert surface. As these catalysts remain insoluble in the reaction mixture, they are referred to as heterogeneous catalysts.
The hydrogenation process takes place on the...
Radical Formation: Homolysis

