Advances and insights in amorphous electrocatalyst towards water splitting

Amorphous materials can markedly enhance the active site amount and optimize the adsorption and desorption of reactants owing to the special structural characteristics of large numbers of randomly oriented bonds and surface-exposed defects. Therefore, many amorphous electrocatalysts have emerged for effectively catalyzing water splitting. Considering the advancement of novel in-situ techniques and theoretical density functional theory calculations, significant progress emerging in amorphous electrocatalysts for water splitting needs to be summarized urgently. Herein, the recent progress of amorphous catalyst materials in water splitting has been systematically reviewed, emphasizing key issues of synthesis methods, stabilization strategies, performance evaluation, mechanistic understanding, integrated experiments, and theoretical studies in water splitting, including hydrogen evolution reaction, oxygen evolution reaction, and overall water splitting. This study focuses on these topics to present the most updated results and the perspectives and challenges for the future development of amorphous electrocatalysts toward water splitting.