Recently, Professor Wan Ying's team from the SHNU School of Chemistry and Materials Science published a research paper titled eg Electron Occupancy as a descriptor for Designing Iron Single Atom Electrocatalysts in Advanced Materials. For the first time, they proposed using the eg orbital electron occupancy of single iron atoms as a key descriptor to guide the design of high-efficiency oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) electrocatalysts. This study breaks through the bottleneck of traditional trial and error design and establishes a quantitative correlation model between electron occupancy number, carrier coordination, and catalytic performance, providing a universal framework for the rational design of single atom catalysts. Shanghai Normal University is the first authorship unit, with Pei Chun, Associate Professor Yao Guohua, and Zhao Ziguang as co-first authors of the paper, and Professor Wan Ying from Shanghai Normal University and Sun Yafei from East China University of Science and Technology as co-corresponding authors of the paper.
This work demonstrated excellent performance in zinc air batteries providing a high-performance and low-cost alternative solution for fuel cells and metal air batteries. It has received funding support from the Key Research and Development Program of the China Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission.
