Congratulations to Ryuichi Iwata, Lenan Zhang, Kyle Wilke, Shuai Gong, and their collaborators in professor Betar Gallant’s group for their recent work on the bubble dynamics in gas-evolving reactions, which was featured on MIT News! In this work, we report the bubble dynamics and overpotential observed during alkaline water splitting on a polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) deposited nickel porous electrode. A slight decrease in hydrophilicity induced a drastic transition of bubble dynamics and a significant increase of the transport overpotential. We show that the porous electrode transitioned from a liquid-filled state to a gas-filled state when varying the wettability, which changed the bubble departure sizes and bubble coverage. As a result, there were substantial changes of the transport overpotential. Our work elucidates the fundamental relationship between wettability and water splitting characteristics, which provides a practical scenario for structuring the electrode for gas-evolving reactions. Read more on MIT News, and read the paper here.