A Critical Reassessment of the Mechanism of the Oxygen Reduction Reaction on Au(poly) in Aqueous Alkaline Electrolytes

Abstract

The oxygen reduction reaction, ORR, in aqueous electrolytes, may rank among the most studied heterogeneous electron transfer processes. Despite the extraordinary efforts of numerous research groups worldwide, critical questions still remain unanswered regarding critical aspects of this technologically important reaction and the dependence of its mechanism and rates on the nature of the electrode material. In their pioneering studies, Zurilla et al.1 examined the ORR on polycrystalline gold, Au(poly), in alkaline solutions, using rotating ring-disk electrode, RRDE, techniques. According to these authors, the experimental evidence collected was consistent with a mechanism involving an initial one-electron transfer to yield adsorbed superoxide ion, O2 -(ads), which, subsequently, underwent a second order heterogeneous dismutation generating solution phase peroxide and oxygen, O2(aq) and HO2 -(aq). The same mechanism was later invoked by Adzic et al.2 for the ORR on Au(100), a surface that displayed extraordinary activity compared to other low index faces of Au. More recently, Ignaczak et al.3 put forward theoretical arguments that support the view that the initial RDS is actually of the outer sphere type, yielding a solvated species, i.e. O2 -(aq), which is then followed by a subsequent, fast, outer sphere one electron-transfer, generating solution phase peroxide, HO2 -(aq), and not by a second order dismutation of as was postulated earlier in the literature. This is shown as the ‘outer sphere pathway’ in Scheme 1. Scheme 1: Proposed inner and outer sphere pathways for ORR on Au in basic solution.This presentation will describe the use of RRDE methods to examine the kinetics of the ORR on Au(poly) in 0.1 M NaOH + 0.9 M NaClO4 aqueous electrolytes containing oxygen in one case and peroxide in the other. The results obtained were found to be consistent with Ignaczak et al.’s mechanism, or equivalently an inner sphere pathway (Scheme 1) which includes a fast equilibrium between O2 -(aq), HO2 -(aq) and their corresponding adsorbed counterparts, O2 -(ads) i.e. and HO2 -(ads) however, a critical assessment of in situ vibrational spectroscopy data published in the literature has raised questions regarding the assignment of the spectral features reported for these adsorbed species. Also considered in this model is the direct reduction of HO2 -(aq) and O2(aq) to generate OH-(aq). Quantitative analyses of data collected in O2-saturated and Ar-purged containing solutions made it possible to determine a unique set of kinetic rate constants for the various steps in the proposed mechanism over a wide potential range.