Electric-Field-Treated Ni/Co <sub>3</sub>O <sub>4</sub> Film as High-Performance Bifunctional Electrocatalysts for Efficient Overall Water Splitting

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Abstract

Highlights

A novel physical approach is proposed to enhance the electrocatalytic performance by electric field.
Under the action of electric field, some stable conductive filaments consisting of oxygen vacancies are formed in the Ni/Co ₃O ₄ film, which remarkably reduces the system resistivity.
The electric-field-treated Ni/Co ₃O ₄ material exhibits significantly superior activity and stability as a bifunctional electrocatalyst for overall water splitting, and its performance exceeds the state-of-the-art electrocatalysts.

Abstract

Rational design of bifunctional electrocatalysts for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) with excellent activity and stability is of great significance, since overall water splitting is a promising technology for sustainable conversion of clean energy. However, most electrocatalysts do not simultaneously possess optimal HER/OER activities and their electrical conductivities are intrinsically low, which limit the development of overall water splitting. In this paper, a strategy of electric field treatment is proposed and applied to Ni/Co ₃O ₄ film to develop a novel bifunctional electrocatalyst. After treated by electric field, the conductive channels consisting of oxygen vacancies are formed in the Co ₃O ₄ film, which remarkably reduces the resistance of the system by almost 2 × 10 ⁴ times. Meanwhile, the surface Ni metal electrode is partially oxidized to nickel oxide, which enhances the catalytic activity. The electric-field-treated Ni/Co ₃O ₄ material exhibits super outstanding performance of HER, OER, and overall water splitting, and the catalytic activity is significantly superior to the state-of-the-art noble metal catalysts (Pt/C, RuO ₂, and RuO ₂ ǁ Pt/C couple). This work provides an effective and feasible method for the development of novel and efficient bifunctional electrocatalyst, which is also promising for wide use in the field of catalysis.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40820-022-00889-3.

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Most cited references 67

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Opportunities and challenges for a sustainable energy future.

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Access to clean, affordable and reliable energy has been a cornerstone of the world's increasing prosperity and economic growth since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Our use of energy in the twenty-first century must also be sustainable. Solar and water-based energy generation, and engineering of microbes to produce biofuels are a few examples of the alternatives. This Perspective puts these opportunities into a larger context by relating them to a number of aspects in the transportation and electricity generation sectors. It also provides a snapshot of the current energy landscape and discusses several research and development opportunities and pathways that could lead to a prosperous, sustainable and secure energy future for the world.

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Noble metal-free hydrogen evolution catalysts for water splitting.

Xiaoxin Zou, Yu Zhang (2015)

Sustainable hydrogen production is an essential prerequisite of a future hydrogen economy. Water electrolysis driven by renewable resource-derived electricity and direct solar-to-hydrogen conversion based on photochemical and photoelectrochemical water splitting are promising pathways for sustainable hydrogen production. All these techniques require, among many things, highly active noble metal-free hydrogen evolution catalysts to make the water splitting process more energy-efficient and economical. In this review, we highlight the recent research efforts toward the synthesis of noble metal-free electrocatalysts, especially at the nanoscale, and their catalytic properties for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). We review several important kinds of heterogeneous non-precious metal electrocatalysts, including metal sulfides, metal selenides, metal carbides, metal nitrides, metal phosphides, and heteroatom-doped nanocarbons. In the discussion, emphasis is given to the synthetic methods of these HER electrocatalysts, the strategies of performance improvement, and the structure/composition-catalytic activity relationship. We also summarize some important examples showing that non-Pt HER electrocatalysts could serve as efficient cocatalysts for promoting direct solar-to-hydrogen conversion in both photochemical and photoelectrochemical water splitting systems, when combined with suitable semiconductor photocatalysts.

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Benchmarking heterogeneous electrocatalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction.

Charles C L McCrory, Suho Jung, Jonas Peters … (2013)

Objective evaluation of the activity of electrocatalysts for water oxidation is of fundamental importance for the development of promising energy conversion technologies including integrated solar water-splitting devices, water electrolyzers, and Li-air batteries. However, current methods employed to evaluate oxygen-evolving catalysts are not standardized, making it difficult to compare the activity and stability of these materials. We report a protocol for evaluating the activity, stability, and Faradaic efficiency of electrodeposited oxygen-evolving electrocatalysts. In particular, we focus on methods for determining electrochemically active surface area and measuring electrocatalytic activity and stability under conditions relevant to an integrated solar water-splitting device. Our primary figure of merit is the overpotential required to achieve a current density of 10 mA cm(-2) per geometric area, approximately the current density expected for a 10% efficient solar-to-fuels conversion device. Utilizing the aforementioned surface area measurements, one can determine electrocatalyst turnover frequencies. The reported protocol was used to examine the oxygen-evolution activity of the following systems in acidic and alkaline solutions: CoO(x), CoPi, CoFeO(x), NiO(x), NiCeO(x), NiCoO(x), NiCuO(x), NiFeO(x), and NiLaO(x). The oxygen-evolving activity of an electrodeposited IrO(x) catalyst was also investigated for comparison. Two general observations are made from comparing the catalytic performance of the OER catalysts investigated: (1) in alkaline solution, every non-noble metal system achieved 10 mA cm(-2) current densities at similar operating overpotentials between 0.35 and 0.43 V, and (2) every system but IrO(x) was unstable under oxidative conditions in acidic solutions.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Dunhui Wang: wangdh@hdu.edu.cn

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Nanomicro Lett

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Nanomicro Lett

Title: Nano-Micro Letters

Publisher: Springer Nature Singapore (Singapore )

ISSN (Print): 2311-6706

ISSN (Electronic): 2150-5551

Publication date (Electronic): 22 July 2022

Publication date PMC-release: 22 July 2022

Publication date Collection: December 2022

Volume: 14

Electronic Location Identifier: 148

Affiliations

[1 ]GRID grid.41156.37, ISNI 0000 0001 2314 964X, National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory for Nanotechnology, School of Physics, , Nanjing University, ; Nanjing, 210093 People’s Republic of China

[2 ]GRID grid.411963.8, ISNI 0000 0000 9804 6672, Hangzhou Dianzi University, ; Hangzhou, 310018 People’s Republic of China

Article

Publisher ID: 889

DOI: 10.1007/s40820-022-00889-3

PMC ID: 9307702

SO-VID: b3c159a8-fefe-4507-8755-7e26b0059e5f

License:

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, 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 changes were made. 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/4.0/.

History

Date received : 13 April 2022

Date accepted : 11 June 2022

Funding

Funded by: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Open Access :

Open access funding provided by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Custom metadata

Keywords: bifunctional electrocatalyst,overall water splitting,co3o4 film,oxygen vacancies,electric field

Data availability:

Keywords: bifunctional electrocatalyst, overall water splitting, co3o4 film, oxygen vacancies, electric field