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Updated: Aug 21, 2026

Hydrogen Production and Utilization in a Membrane Reactor
Published on: March 10, 2023
Accelerating H* Redistribution via Hydrogen Spillover for Enhanced Electrochemical Hydrogen Production From
Xuanni Lin1,2, Xi Chen3, Qiannan Liu1
1Key Laboratory of Biomass Chemical Engineering of Ministry of Education, College of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
None:
Producing hydrogen from formaldehyde oxidation reaction (FOR) offers a promising low-energy approach for generating clean fuel. However, the FOR involves continuous C─H bond cleavage of adsorbed intermediates to generate abundant surface H*. This necessitates rapid transfer and consumption of H* to sustain fast oxidation kinetics. Herein, we developed a hydrogen-spillover strategy to redistribute these surface H* to accelerate FOR kinetics by constructing RhCu single-atom alloy supported on a Cu single-atom-rich carbon matrix (RhCu@CuSANC). In this design, Cu incorporation creates a favorable landscape for H* migration toward the CuSANC support, which acts as efficient H* acceptors and H─H coupling centers. Verified through multiple analyses, this hydrogen-spillover mechanism is demonstrated to enhance FOR activity by accelerating H* redistribution. Consequently, RhCu@CuSANC shows outstanding FOR performance, achieving a current density of 800 mA cm- 2 at 0.39 V with nearly 100% H2 selectivity and excellent durability. When integrated into a hybrid alkali-acid cell, it provides an open circuit voltage of 1.72 V and peak power density of 152.6 mW cm- 2 with stable H2 production for over 1200 h at 10 mA cm- 2. These results demonstrate that hydrogen spillover boosts oxidative electrocatalysis, providing a general design principle for multicomponent catalysts with coordinated hydrogen dynamics.
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