A Long‐Range Disordering RuO2 Catalyst for Highly Efficient Acidic Oxygen Evolution Electrocatalysis

Non‐iridium acid‐stabilized electrocatalysts for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are crucial to reducing the cost of proton exchange membrane water electrolyzers (PEMWEs). Here, we report a strategy to modulate the stability of RuO2 by doping boron (B) atoms, leading to the preparation of a RuO2 catalyst with long‐range disorder (LD‐B/RuO2). The structure of long‐range disorder endowed LD‐B/RuO2 with a low overpotential of 175 mV and an ultra‐long stability, which can maintain OER for about 1.6 months at 10 mA cm‐2 current density in 0.5 M H2SO4 with almost invariable performance. More importantly, a PEM electrolyzer using LD‐B/RuO2 as the anode demonstrated excellent performance, reaching 1000 mA cm−2 at 1.63 V with durability exceeding 300 h at 250 mA cm−2 current density. The introduction of B atoms induced the formation of a long‐range disordered structure and symmetry‐breaking B‐Ru‐O motifs, which enabled the catalyst structure to a certain toughness while simultaneously inducing the redistribution of electrons on the active center Ru, which jointly promoted and guaranteed the activity and long‐term stability of LD‐B/RuO2. This study provides a strategy to prepare long‐range disordered RuO2 acidic OER catalysts with high stability using B‐doping to perturb crystallinity, which opens potential possibilities for non‐iridium‐based PEMWE applications.