Copper Containing Molecular Systems in Electrocatalytic Water Oxidation—Trends and Perspectives

Abstract

Molecular design represents an exciting platform to refine mechanistic details of electrocatalytic water oxidation and explore new perspectives. In the growing number of publications some general trends seem to be outlined concerning the operation mechanisms, with the help of experimental and theoretical approaches that have been broadly applied in the case of bioinorganic systems. In this review we focus on bio-inspired Cu-containing complexes that are classified according to the proposed mechanistic pathways and the related experimental evidence, strongly linked to the applied ligand architecture. In addition, we devote special attention to features of molecular compounds, which have been exploited in the efficient fabrication of catalytically active thin films.

Design of molecular water oxidation catalysts with earth-abundant metal ions

“…This paper reviews the frontier of water oxidation reactions mediated by the earth-abundant-first-row transition-metal complexes. Although several excellent and relevant reviews are available, [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43] this review aims to extract the principles from the literature for the design of molecular water oxidation catalysts based on the earth-abundant first-row-transition-metal complexes. The review begins with an introduction to the challenges in creating efficient and robust catalysts for the purpose.…”

Buffer anion effects on water oxidation catalysis: The case of Cu(III) complex

“…Recently, we reported that redox-active ligands [14,23] can share the charge accumulation and thus avoid the formation of high-valent intermediates, such as Ru V and Co V , to ensure water oxidation under a "safe condition". Cu-based molecular water oxidation catalysts [51] suffer from a large overpotential, due to the high oxidation potential of the Cu IV /Cu III couple. On this basis, we aimed to introduce the redox-active TAML ligand to regulate the redox properties of Cu-based catalysts.…”

Copper‐based metal–organic framework decorated by CuO hair‐like nanostructures: Electrocatalyst for oxygen evolution reaction

“…The probable mechanism for the OER using the CuO@MIL-53(Cu) electrocatalyst is proposed here. [41] According to the general reaction scheme, the protoncoupled electron transfer of H 2 O bound to the metal center yielding a Cu-OH species is regarded as the first step in the OER (Equation 4):…”