A New Highly Oxygen-Deficient and Cubic PR₃Zro_8-δ for Intermediate-Temperature Thermochemical Production of Oxygen and Hydrogen

Author(s)

• Jiaxin Lu
• Yongliang Zhang
• Luhong Chen
• Yan Chen
• Ke An
• Yasser Shoukry
• Xinfang Jin
• Zhi-Hao Wang
• Sai Mu, University of South CarolinaFollow
• Kevin Huang, University of South CarolinaFollow

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Two-step thermochemical cycles offer a clean route for hydrogen and oxygen production but are typically limited to high temperatures exceeding 1500 °C. Lowering operating temperatures would enable the use of alternative heat sources such as industrial waste heat. Here, we report Pr₃ZrO₈ as a new enabling material for efficient intermediate-temperature redox cycling, with thermal reduction at 900 °C in argon and steam oxidation at 400 °C. Pr₃ZrO₈ adopts a face-centered cubic structure similar to CeO₂ but exhibits significantly greater oxygen deficiency, achieving average oxygen and hydrogen fluxes of 331.7 and 70.3 µmol·g-1, respectively, over ten cycles at 20%H₂O. These values surpass those of leading CeO_2₋δ and perovskite oxides under comparable or more severe conditions. In-situ neutron and X-ray diffraction determine the phase stability boundaries of Pr₃ZrO₈, while density functional theory identifies O-H bond cleavage as the rate-limiting step. These results establish Pr₃ZrO₈ as a promising material for intermediate-temperature thermochemical oxygen and hydrogen production.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69235-0

Publication Info

Published in Nature Communications, Volume 17, 2026.

Rights

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

APA Citation

Lu, J., Zhang, Y., Chen, L., Chen, Y., An, K., Shoukry, Y., Jin, X., Wang, Z.-H., Mu, S., Lei, X., & Huang, K. (2026). A new highly oxygen-deficient and cubic Pr3ZrO8-δ for intermediate-temperature thermochemical production of oxygen and hydrogen. Nature Communications, 17.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69235-0