Mechanistic study of nickel based catalysts for oxygen evolution and methanol oxidation in alkaline medium

Abstract

Nickel based catalysts have been studied as catalysts for either organic compound (especially methanol) oxidation or oxygen evolution reactions in alkaline medium for decades, but methanol oxidation and oxygen evolution reactions occur at a similar potential range and pH with nickel based catalysts. In contrast to previous studies, we studied these two reactions simultaneously under various pH and methanol concentrations with electrodes containing a series of NiOOH surface concentrations. We found that nickel based catalysts are more suitable to be used as oxygen evolution catalysts than methanol oxidation catalysts based on the observation that: The rate-determining step of methanol oxidation involves NiOOH, OH− and methanol while high methanol to OH− ratio could poison the NiOOH sites. Since NiOOH is involved in the rate-determining step, methanol oxidation suffers from high overpotential and oxygen evolution is favored over methanol oxidation in the presence of an equivalent amount (0.1 M) of alkali and methanol.