Amorphous Materials for Elementary-Gas-Involved Electrocatalysis: An Overview

Given the critical demands on energy conversion, storage, and transportation, tremendous interests have been devoted to the field of material development relating to energy harvest recently. As the only route towards energy utilization, the carriers with characteristics of low carbon are regarded as the future choice, e.g., hydrogen and ammonia. To this end, electrocatalysis provides a green way to access these substances. However, the unfulfilled conversion efficiency is the bottleneck for practical application. In this review, the promising characteristics of amorphous materials and the amorphous-induced electrocatalytic enhancement (AIEE) were emphasized. In the beginning, the characteristics of amorphous materials are briefly summarized. Whereafter, the basic mechanism of heterogeneous electrocatalytic reactions is illustrated, including the hydrogen/oxygen evolution and oxygen/nitrogen reduction. In the third part, the electrocatalytic performance of amorphous materials is discussed in detail, meanwhile, the mechanism of AIEE is highlighted. In the last section of this review, the challenges and outlook for the development of amorphous enhanced electrocatalysis are presented.