Jane and AJ publish paper describing critical degradation processes for commonly used substrates in electrocatalytic research

Jane’s collaborative paper with AJ highlights that glassy carbon, which is used ubiquitously as a substrate material for electrochemical water oxidation studies, is not electrochemically inert under relevant reaction conditions on the timescale of common stability tests. Critically, this can cause electrodes to exhibit performance losses that do not reflect the intrinsic stability of the actual catalyst material being investigated. In light of our findings, we underscore the usefulness of metrics, such as the S-number, to reflect intrinsic catalyst material stability.