Understanding activity trends in electrochemical water oxidation to form hydrogen peroxide

Abstract

Electrochemical production of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) from water oxidation could provide a very attractive route to locally produce a chemically valuable product from an abundant resource. Herein using density functional theory calculations, we predict trends in activity for water oxidation towards H2O2 evolution on four different metal oxides, i.e., WO3, SnO2, TiO2 and BiVO4. The density functional theory predicted trend for H2O2 evolution is further confirmed by our experimental measurements. Moreover, we identify that BiVO4 has the best H2O2 generation amount of those oxides and can achieve a Faraday efficiency of about 98% for H2O2 production.