Ultrafast heating to boost the electrocatalytic activity of iridium towards oxygen evolution reaction

Efficient electrocatalysts are in great demand for renewable energy storage systems. Herein, we propose an ultrafast heating strategy to fabricate an efficient Ir/CP-UH catalyst for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Experimental results demonstrated that the ultrasmall Ir nanoparticles (≈1–3 nm) and clusters (<1 nm) were highly dispersed on the carbon paper support after a short thermal shock (∼5 s). The catalyst showed a low overpotential of 260 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and remarkable mass activity of about 13.8 times higher than that of the current state-of-the-art commercial Ir/C catalyst. This ultrafast heating strategy can also be applied to other catalyst systems for OER and other electrochemical reactions.