Pourbaix Machine Learning Framework Identifies Acidic Water Oxidation Catalysts Exhibiting Suppressed Ruthenium Dissolution

The demand for green hydrogen has raised concerns over the availability of iridium used in oxygen evolution reaction catalysts. We identify catalysts with the aid of a machine learning-aided computational pipeline trained on more than 36,000 mixed metal oxides. The pipeline accurately predicts Pourbaix decomposition energy (G_pbx) from unrelaxed structures with a mean absolute error of 77 meV per atom, enabling us to screen 2070 new metallic oxides with respect to their prospective stability under acidic conditions. The search identifies Ru_0.6Cr_0.2Ti_0.2O₂ as a candidate having the promise of increased durability: experimentally, we find that it provides an overpotential of 267 mV at 100 mA cm^-2 and that it operates at this current density for over 200 h and exhibits a rate of overpotential increase of 25 μV h^-1. Surface density functional theory calculations reveal that Ti increases metal-oxygen covalency, a potential route to increased stability, while Cr lowers the energy barrier of the HOO* formation rate-determining step, increasing activity compared to RuO₂ and reducing overpotential by 40 mV at 100 mA cm^-2 while maintaining stability. In situ X-ray absorption spectroscopy and ex situ ptychography-scanning transmission X-ray microscopy show the evolution of a metastable structure during the reaction, slowing Ru mass dissolution by 20× and suppressing lattice oxygen participation by >60% compared to RuO₂.