Research Symposium

BIO

My name is Valeriya Shipulya and I am a second-year at Florida State University majoring in Health Management on the Interdisciplinary Medical Sciences Track. After graduation, I intend to pursue a Master's degree and am possibly considering an M.D program.

Scaling Up Production of a Promising Catalyst for Water Electrolysis: AlFe2B2

Abstract

Sustainable water electrolysis aims to provide a source of hydrogen fuel to combat the environmental problems associated with the use of fossil fuels, global warming and pollution. The Oxygen Evolution Reaction (OER) is one of the two half-reactions of water electrolysis. Recent studies by the Shatruk group[1] identified AlFe2B2 as a promising OER electrocatalyst whose activity is comparable to that of the state-of-the-art IrO2 and RuO2 catalysts under conditions of alkali electrolysis. In contrast to these expensive catalysts, AlFe2B2 is composed of inexpensive earth-abundant elements. Our goal is to scale up the synthesis of this material to a multi-gram scale and confirm whether the catalytic activity is maintained at the larger scale. We synthesized a one-gram sample of AlFe2B2 and isolated it as a pure single-phase product that was confirmed by powder X-Ray diffraction. It was then ball-milled to increase the surface area and converted to an ink to test the catalytic activity using cyclic voltammetry. Next, we have increased the synthesis scale to 5 g. Scaling up to even larger amounts can be achieved via a parallel synthetic process. We tested this catalyst on a commercial electrolyzer and it showed performance comparable to the industrial standards, although further optimization of the catalyst is required.

Keywords: oxygen evolution reaction, catalyst, water electrolysis