Facile synthesis of Co, N dual-doped Ni2P grown on nickel foam as active electrocatalyst for oxygen evolution reaction

초록

Due to the increasingly severe energy depletion and environmental pollution, a lot of studies on efficient and renewable energy have been actively conducted. Recently, Hydrogen is regarded as the most prospective energy source to replace the traditional fossil fuels. Overall water electrolysis, which consists of hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) on the cathode and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) on the anode, is a noticeable technology for producing high-purity hydrogen. The OER has complicated reaction mechanism involving four electron transfer, thereby resulting in high overpotential. To overcome this issue, noble metal-based materials, such as IrO2 and RuO2, are generally employed as electrocatalysts owing to their high activity. However, the high cost and poor stability of precious metal-based electrocatalyst have limited widespread application of water electrolysis. Therefore, non-noble metal-based electrocatalysts with high OER performance have been explored. Specifically, Ni-, Co-, Fe-, Mn-based electrocatalysts, including their phosphides, sulfides, oxides, chalcogenides, have studied due to their adjustable electronic structure and earth abundance. Among them, transition metal phosphides (TMPs), which have high electrical conductivity, high electrochemical stability, and rich active sites, have been reported as efficient OER electrocatalysts. Furthermore, in order to increase intrinsic OER performance, heteroatom doping strategy has been carried out to modify their electronic configuration structure. The introduction of dual dopants, which have different polarity and electronegativity, can not only modify the electronic state of host species but change the adsorption free energy of reaction intermediates during the OER process.