The continuous advance in exploring renewable energy resources such as solar and wind will certainly alleviate our reliance on limited fossil reserves. However, the sustainable development of mankind demands not only energy but also carbon-based chemical goods. Unfortunately, exploitation of renewable energy resources like solar and wind will not lead to any carbon-based chemicals. The only sustainable and green carbon source is biomass, the scale of annual production of which has an immense potential to complement that of fossil-derived carbons. To utilize biomass in economically effective ways, many catalytic processes have been investigated. Among various strategies of biomass refinery, electrocatalytic upgrading stands out as an attractive option because of its benign operation conditions, high energy efficiency, and convenient control on production rate and selectivity using electrochemical parameters. This Minireview showcases several electrocatalytic systems for both reductive and oxidative upgrading of representative biomass-derived intermediate compounds, including 5-hydroxymethylfurfural, furfural, levulinic acid, glycerol, and sorbitol to different value-added products. The catalytic routes and mechanisms of each biomass-derived platform compound are discussed and compared. In order to be feasible for large-scale applications, low-cost composition and preparation of electrocatalysts are mandatory and will be emphasized. Finally, our personal perspective on the current challenges and future directions of electrocatalytic biomass upgrading is presented.

Exploring cost-effective and efficient bifunctional electrocatalysts via simple fabrication strategies is strongly desired for practical water splitting. Herein, an easy and fast one-step electrodeposition process is developed to fabricate W-doped NiFe (NiFeW)-layered double hydroxides with ultrathin nanosheet features at room temperature and ambient pressure as bifunctional catalysts for water splitting. Notably, the NiFeW nanosheets require overpotentials of only 239 and 115 mV for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), respectively, to reach a current density of 10 mA/cm2 in alkaline media. Their exceptional performance is further demonstrated in a full electrolyzer configuration with the NiFeW as both anode and cathode catalysts, which achieves a low cell voltage of 1.59 V at 10 mA/cm2, 110 mV lower than that of the commercial IrO2 (anode) and Pt (cathode) catalysts. Moreover, the NiFeW nanosheets are superior to various recently reported bifunctional electrocatalysts. Such remarkable performances mainly ascribe to W doping, which not only effectively modulates the electrocatalyst morphology but also engineers the electronic structure of NiFe hydroxides to boost charge-transfer kinetics for both the OER and HER. Hence, the ultrathin NiFeW nanosheets with an efficient fabrication strategy are promising as bifunctional electrodes for alkaline water electrolyzers.

For a proton exchange membrane electrolyzer cell (PEMEC), conditioning is an essential process to enhance its performance, reproducibility, and economic efficiency. To get more insights into conditioning, a PEMEC with Ir-coated gas diffusion electrode (IrGDE) was investigated by electrochemistry and in situ visualization characterization techniques. The changes of polarization curves, electrochemical impedance spectra (EIS), and bubble dynamics before and after conditioning are analyzed. The polarization curves show that the cell efficiency increased by 9.15% at 0.4 A/cm2, and the EIS and Tafel slope results indicate that both the ohmic and activation overpotential losses decrease after conditioning. The visualization of bubble formation unveils that the number of bubble sites increased greatly from 14 to 29 per pore after conditioning, at the same voltage of 1.6 V. Under the same current density of 0.2 A/cm2; the average bubble detachment size decreased obviously from 35 to 25 μm. The electrochemistry and visualization characterization results jointly unveiled the increase of reaction sites and the surface oxidation on the IrGDE during conditioning, which provides more insights into the conditioning and benefits for the future GDE design and optimization.

In practice, the proton exchange membrane electrolyzer cell (PEMEC) is considered to be one of the optimal hydrogen production devices with its superior compact design, high efficiency, preeminent hydrogen purity, and great compatibility with PEM fuel cells (PEMFCs). [13][14][15][16][17][18] Although the advantages of PEMECs are apparent, the high cost has been holding back its large-scale application. Precious platinumgroup metals such as Ir and Ru are mostly used as anode catalysts to withstand the aggressive anode working environment in PEMECs. [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] As reported by Ayers et al., for a practical stack with a daily production of 13 kg H 2 , the membrane electrode assembly (MEA) accounts for one quarter of the stack cost. [30] Therefore, decreasing the anode catalyst loading, simplifying anode fabrication, and cutting down electrode cost are effective strategies to reduce a PEMEC's cost and boost its commercial application.At present, a catalyst-coated membrane (CCM)/porous transport layer (PTL) design is most widely employed in PEMECs. [31,32] The great progress has been made in the research and development of CCMs to reduce catalyst loadings and to enhance long-term durability. [33,34] However, Mo et al. discovered that a large portion of the catalyst on the membrane is underutilized in the CCM/PTL design due to the conductivity limit of the ionomer mixed catalyst layer (CL). [35] They An anode electrode concept of thin catalyst-coated liquid/gas diffusion layers (CCLGDLs), by integrating Ir catalysts with Ti thin tunableLGDLs with facile electroplating in proton exchange membrane electrolyzer cells (PEMECs), is proposed. The CCLGDL design with only 0.08 mg Ir cm −2 can achieve comparative cell performances to the conventional commercial electrode design, saving ≈97% Ir catalyst and augmenting a catalyst utilization to ≈24 times. CCLGDLs with regulated patterns enable insight into how pattern morphology impacts reaction kinetics and catalyst utilization inPEMECs. A specially designed two-sided transparent reaction-visible cell assists the in situ visualization of the PEM/electrode reaction interface for the first time. Oxygen gas is observed accumulating at the reaction interface, limiting the active area and increasing the cell impedances. It is demonstrated that mass transport in PEMECs can be modified by tuning CCLGDL patterns, thus improving the catalyst activation and utilization. The CCLGDL concept promises a future electrode design strategy with a simplified fabrication process and enhanced catalyst utilization. Furthermore, the CCLGDL concept also shows great potential in being a powerful tool for in situ reaction interface research in PEMECs and other energy conversion devices with solid polymer electrolytes.

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