In situ PDF studies on the structure and crystallization of Co/Ni-B-oxide catalysts for oxygen evolution reaction.

For electrochemical water splitting, the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is thermodynamically challenging and is therefore considered as the bottleneck of the process. Recently, transition metal oxide catalysts containing boron have gained attraction for their high catalytic activity in OER. We aim to investigate the structure-property relations of different Co/Ni-B oxides for OER. We focus on the structure evolution of these highly active catalysts on the atomic scale, starting from amorphous precursors via intermediate structures to crystalline materials by in situ total scattering experiments and subsequent pair distribution function analysis. To achieve this, we aim to perform temperature- and time-dependent in situ heating experiments at the beamtime ID15A. Besides time resolution the beamline provides the possibility to measure to high Qmax values. Based on the results we aim to correlate structure properties to the catalytic activity.