Facile synthesis of hollow-structured Fe, F dual-doped CoS2 electrocatalyst for oxygen evolution reaction

초록

Due to the serious environmental problems caused by excessive consumption of fossil fuels, developing renewable energy sources and sustainable storage process have attracted significant attention from many researchers. The hydrogen is considered as one of the leading options for alternative energy carrier owing to its high gravimetric energy density. Water electrolysis is an efficient way to produce ultra-high purity hydrogen without environmental pollution. However, sluggish reaction dynamics and high overpotential of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) at anode greatly hinders the overall efficiency of water electrolysis. Although precious metal-based materials, such as IrO2 and RuO2, are considered as state-of-the-art OER electrocatalysts, their high cost, scarcity and low stability during long-term operation have limited their large-scale applications. Therefore, enormous efforts have been performed for development of highly efficient and stable noble metal-free electrocatalysts. Recently, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), a class of inorganic-organic hybrid crystalline materials fabricated via the self-assembly of metal cations and organic building blocks, have aroused considerable interest owing to their high porosity, multifunctional properties, large specific surface area. Prussian-blue-analogues (PBAs) with the formula M[M(CN)] (M = Fe, Co, Ni, etc) are a class of MOFs with coordinated metal sites linked by the cyano groups. PBA materials can be simply converted to transition-metal based chalcogenides, which are widely explored as efficient OER electrocatalysts. Therefore, they can be utilized as an appropriate precursor for transition metal-based electrocatalysts.