Machine learning approaches for electrocatalyst design in water splitting: a review for green hydrogen production

Abstract

The production of green hydrogen through water splitting requires highly efficient electrocatalysts, but the current trial-and-error-based synthesis or discovery is time-consuming, costly and resource-intensive. Machine learning (ML) provides a powerful, data-driven alternative that can model complex structure-activity relationships across large chemical spaces at orders-of-magnitude speed. This review systematically overviews the life cycle of the electrocatalyst research and development application of ML. First, the thermodynamic and kinetic principles of the hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions are summarised, along with some well-adopted and accepted activity descriptors. Then we explore data sources, featurization approaches, and algorithms, and discuss the model space, from a simple interpretable model to a graph neural network to a generative model, in the context of the ML toolkit. Strategic applications are discussed for high-throughput virtual screening of alloys and single-atom catalysts, as well as multifunctional activity prediction for overall water splitting, and stability optimisation under operating conditions. The topic of emerging frontiers is highlighted, including high-entropy alloys, amorphous materials, and linking atomic-scale understanding to device-level performance through integration with density functional theory. Finally, the problems of data scarcity, model interpretability and the discrepancy between computational predictions and industrial implementation are discussed, along with future directions for closed-loop discovery and self-driving laboratories. Incorporating ML into electrocatalyst design and combining it with autonomous experimentation will revolutionise this process, from simulation to energy solution, dramatically speeding it up.