Interfacial Chemical Strategies for Boosting Water Electrolysis Efficiency through Bubble Management

Gas bubble formation and accumulation at gas-evolving electrodes impose critical limitations on the efficiency, stability, and scalability of water electrolysis. While electrode micro/nanostructuring and external-field-assisted bubble removal have been widely explored, these approaches are often material-specific, fabrication-intensive, and difficult to generalize across electrolyzer architectures. In this Review, we present a chemically focused and application-oriented perspective on bubble management, emphasizing strategies that regulate interfacial bubble dynamics through electrode surface chemistry and electrolyte modification. After outlining the fundamentals of bubble nucleation, growth, and detachment, chemical approaches are classified into three main categories: (i) chemical and chemo-geometric surface modification, (ii) surfactant-assisted electrolyte engineering, and (iii) control of electrolyte pH, concentration, and ionic composition. Beyond qualitative discussion, we construct comparative performance landscapes that map stability retention, current density, operation duration, overpotential reduction, and bubble-size suppression across reported systems. These metrics are deliberately selected to reflect industrial operating constraints, enabling direct cross-study comparison. Overall, this analysis highlights chemically driven bubble management as a generalizable and scalable pathway toward durable, high-current-density water electrolysis and related (photo)electrochemical systems.