Critical Assessment of Electronic Structure Descriptors for Predicting Perovskite Catalytic Properties

The discovery and design of materials that can efficiently catalyze the oxygen reduction and evolution reactions at reduced temperatures is important for facilitating the widespread adoption of fuel cell and electrolyzer technologies. Numerous studies have produced correlations between catalytic properties, such as oxygen surface exchange or electrode area-specific resistance (ASR), and the properties of the catalyst material. However, correlations have historically been limited in scope (e.g., using only a few materials or at a single temperature), and it has been difficult to provide detailed assessments of their robustness. Here, we assess the ability of the O p-band center electronic structure descriptor, obtained from density functional theory calculations, to correlate with oxygen surface exchange rates, diffusivities, and ASRs for a large database of perovskite oxide catalytic properties. By data mining the literature, we obtain 747 catalytic property value data points spanning 299 unique perovskite compositions from 313 studies. We assess linear correlations of each property with the O p-band center and find generally modest correlations that are qualitatively useful (prediction mean absolute errors of about 0.5 log units are typical), where the correlations are improved at higher temperatures (e.g., 800 °C vs 500 °C) and significantly improve when considering fits to the subset of materials which have multiple independent measurements. These findings suggest that the spread of property data is significantly influenced by experimental uncertainty, and subsequent measurements of additional materials will likely improve the O p-band center correlations.