The global ecological and environmental crisis has been a primary challenge for the community of shared future for mankind. Water treatment and water electrolysis technologies are of great significance for achieving sustainable utilization of water resources and promoting the development of clean energy. However, the catalytic materials currently employed for water treatment are still suffering several problems, such as low efficiency and reusability, which are scarcely meet the requirements of the modern industry; the catalytic materials employed for high-performance water electrolysis are mainly based on carbon supported noble metals. Their high-cost, poor interface stability, and complex processing method hinder the large-scale application of the water electrolysis technology. Therefore, how to construct active sites to achieve lowcost, high activity and strong stability of catalytic materials is still a bottleneck problem in this field.

Disordered alloys, also referred to as "structurally disordered" amorphous alloys and "chemically disordered" high-entropy alloys (HEAs), have a broad application prospect in the field of water treatment and water electrolysis. NPMM has equipped a well-integrated rapid quenching technology for the purposes of developing a variety of disordered alloys. With respect to the water treatment aspect, our team has developed a microalloying method of amorphous alloys that enable to regulate the atomic coordination configuration for improving catalytic efficiency, and discovered an in-situ self-reconstruction phenomenon for strengthening catalytic stability. It was found that the addition of P element into Fe₈₃Si₂B₁₁P₃C₁ amorphous alloy would lead to the formation of Fe-P clusters, which would facilitate electronic delocalization to improve the electron transfer efficiency (Figure 1a). A variety of industrial dyes were completely decolorized within 20 minutes (Figure 1b). Moreover, the in-situ self-reconstruction phenomenon of the amorphous alloy provided a favorable guarantee for active site protection, oxidant adsorption, and excellent ion permeability, which sharply elevate the reusability to more than 40 times. Compared to the crystalline zero-valent iron and Fe₂O₃ catalysts employed in industry, the amorphous alloy has a higher catalytic activity and stability, exhibiting a great potential in future industrial application. [Adv. Funct. Mater., 2019, 29: 1807857]. In terms of the water electrolysis, our team developed a structural design strategy by disordered - ordered coupling, and discovered a constructive method of active sites through lattice distortion and elemental synergistic coupling. According to these alloy design concepts, a new high-entropy intermetallic compound (HEI) and a high-entropy amorphous alloy were successfully developed for effective water electrolysis. Firstly, to break through the limitation of single principal component in amorphous alloy design, our team developed a high-entropy amorphous alloy with five principal components. Dealloying method was employed to construct a nanosponge surface morphology (Figure 2a-c). It was found that the high entropy amorphous alloy spontaneously formed nanocrystals surrounding at the nanopores (Figure 2c), while the nanocrystals presenting a certain lattice distortion effect (Figure 2d). Theoretical calculations revealed that lattice distortion effect and synergistic function of the high entropy amorphous alloy could effectively reduce the energy barrier of the hydrogen proton adsorption/desorption, resulting in an excellent hydrogen evolution reaction. At the current density of 10 mA cm^-2, the achieved overpotentials were only 32 mV and 62 mV at the basic and acidic conditions. Moreover, the strong solid solution effect significantly improves the structural stability of the alloy, enabling it to maintain excellent catalytic activity over 100 hours (Figure 2e). [Adv. Funct. Mater., 2021, 31: 2101586]. Secondly, we also combined the advantages of synergistic function in HEAs and the site isolation effect in intermetallic compounds to develop a new HEI (Figure 3a-d) that can significantly reduce the adsorption/desorption energy barrier of the water molecules and hydrogen proton during hydrogen evolution reaction. The achieved overpotential (88.2 mV@10 mA cm^-2) was comparable with noblemetal-based electrocatalysts, providing a low-cost technical support for high-performance integrated electrode design. [Adv. Mater., 2020, 32: 2000385].

Figure 1(a) Comparison of density of electronic states between Fe₈₃Si₂B₁₁P₃C₁ and Fe₇₈Si₉B₁₃ amorphous alloy;Fe₈₃Si₂B₁₁P₃C₁ amorphous alloy (b) Degradation of industrial dyes after reaction of 20 times (c) composition (d) structural changes

Figure 2 Entropy amorphous alloy (a) Preparation after dealloying (b) Surface topography (c) cross-section structure and nanocrystals (d) Theoretical calculation model of the lattice distortion of nanocrystals (e) Hydrogen evolution behavior and stability

Figure 3 High-entropy intermetallic compound (a) Preparation after dealloying (b) Surface topography (c) Atom distribution (d) Composition analysis (e) Comparison of electrochemical hydrogen evolution

Figure 4 Cover of Advanced Materials and Advanced Functional Materials