Recent progress on nanostructured bimetallic electrocatalysts for water splitting and electroreduction of carbon dioxide

The exploitation of renewable energy as well as the elimination of the harmful impact of excessive carbon emission are worldwide concerns for sustainable development of the ecological environment on earth. To address that, the technologies regarding energy conversion systems, such as water splitting and electroreduction of carbon dioxide, have attracted significant attention for a few decades. Yet, to date, the production of green fuels and/or high energy density chemicals like hydrogen, methane, and ethanol, are still suffering from many drawbacks including high energy consumption, low selectivity, and sluggish reaction rate. In this regard, nanostructured bimetallic materials that is capable of taking the full benefits of the coupling effects between different elements/components with structure modification in nanoscale are considered as a promising strategy for high-performance electrocatalysts. Herein, this review aims to outline the important progress of these nanostructured bimetallic electrocatalysts. It starts with the introduction of some important fundamental background knowledge about the reaction mechanism to understand how these reactions happen. Subsequently, we summarize the most recent progress regarding how the nanostructured bimetallic electrocatalysts manipulate the activity and selectivity of catalytic reactions in the order of bimetallic alloying effect, interface/substrate effect of bi-component electrocatalyst, and nanostructuring effect. (paper)