Topic: Advanced Catalytic Materials for Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Storage

Advanced catalytic materials for electrochemical energy conversion and storage have emerged as a critical cornerstone in the global transition toward sustainable and clean energy economies. Their performance and viability stem from tailored active sites and optimized mass/charge transport pathways, enabling efficient multi-electron transfer processes across various electrochemical interfaces. This catalytic efficiency is further driven by innovative structural engineering at the atomic or molecular scale, such as defect engineering, single-atom isolation, phase manipulation, and heterostructure construction, which facilitates the rational design of highly active and durable electrocatalysts with virtually unlimited compositional possibilities. As a result, advanced catalytic materials have been widely explored in established technologies like water splitting and fuel cells, while increasingly demonstrating transformative potential in emerging fields, including carbon dioxide reduction, nitrogen fixation, and next-generation metal-air batteries.

This Special Issue highlights the crucial role of advanced catalytic materials as a bridge between fundamental surface chemistry and device-level energy applications. It emphasizes how innovative synthetic strategies, advanced in situ/operando characterizations, and theoretical modeling can give rise to deep insights into structure-activity relationships and reaction mechanisms beyond conventional empirical paradigms. By bringing together contributions spanning diverse materials design and electrochemical processes, this collection aims to provide a comprehensive overview of recent advances in the field, illustrating how catalytic activity, selectivity, and durability can be intrinsically encoded through material architecture and realized across multiple length scales.

Advanced catalytic materials, Electrochemical energy conversion, Energy storage, Electrocatalysis, Water splitting, Fuel cells, Carbon dioxide reduction, Single-atom catalysts, Operando characterization, Structure-activity relationships, Device performance, Material architecture