Understanding Electrocatalytic Pathways in Low and Medium Temperature Fuel Cells: Synchrotron-based In Situ X-Ray Absorption Spectroscopy

Over the last few decades, researchers have made significant developments in producing more advanced electrocatalytic materials for power generation applications. For example, traditional fuel cell catalysts often involve highpriced precious metals such as Pt. However, in order for fuel cells to become commercially viable, there is a need to reduce or completely remove precious metal altogether. As a result, a myriad of novel, unconventional materials have been explored such as chalcogenides, porphyrins, and organic-metal-macrocycles for low/ medium temperature fuel cells as well as enzymatic and microbial fuel cells.1-3 As these materials increasingly become more complex, researchers often find themselves in search of new characterization methods, especially those which are allow in situ and operando measurements with element specificity. One such method that has received much attention for analysis of electrocatalytic materials is X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS). XAS is an element specific, core level absorption technique which yields structural and electronic information. As a core electron method, XAS requires an extremely bright source, hence a synchrotron. The resulting intensity of synchrotron radiation allow for experiments to be conducted in situ, under electrochemically relevant conditions. Although a bulkaveraging technique requiring rigorous mathematical manipulation, XAS has the added benefit that it can probe materials which possess no long range order. This makes it ideal to characterize nano-scale electrocatalysts. XAS experiments are conducted by ramping the X-ray photon energy while measuring absorption of the incident beam the sample or by counting fluorescent photons released from a sample due to subsequent relaxation. Absorption mode XAS follows the BeerLambert Law,