Site-selective OH adsorption via in-plane Ru-N-M bridges enables practical water electrolysis

The pursuit of high-performance anion exchange membrane water electrolysis (AEMWE) catalysts is limited by conventional supported and lattice-doped materials, which suffer from weak interfacial coupling and suboptimal intermediate adsorption, leading to degradation under industrial conditions. Although atomic-level modulation is highly appealing, achieving a synergistic balance between robust structural stability and precise control over the reaction pathway remains challenging. Herein, by employing a nitrogen-coordinated metal bridging strategy, we report a Ru-NiFeN with atomically coordinated Ru-N bridges for practical water electrolysis. This configuration manipulates the local electronic microenvironment to trigger a site-specific redirection of OH adsorption from Fe to Ru centers, effectively bypassing host-lattice scaling-relation limitations and lowering OER barriers. In-situ spectroscopy and theoretical calculations reveal that the Ru-N bridge promotes resilient dynamic structural reconstruction, enabling potential-triggered NiOOH formation while suppressing detrimental metal oxidation. The Ru-NiFeN catalyst achieves a low overpotential of 340 mV at 1 A cm^-2 and demonstrates outstanding AEMWE durability, operating for over 800 h at 2 A cm^-2 with a decay rate of only 24.4 μV h^-1, positioning it among the most active catalysts reported. This work provides a strategic pathway for optimizing adsorption landscapes via atomic coordination engineering for efficient, stable energy conversion.