Trimetallic Oxyhydroxide Coralloids for Efficient Oxygen Evolution Electrocatalysis

Yecan Pi¹, Qi Shao¹, Pengtang Wang¹, Fan Lv^2，3，4, Shaojun Guo^{*，2，3，4}（郭少军）, Jun Guo⁵, Xiaoqing Huang^*，1（黄小青）

¹College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Soochow University, Jiangsu, China

²Department of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China

³The Beijing Innovation Center for Engineering Science and Advanced Technology, Peking University, Beijing, China

⁴Department of Energy and Resources Engineering, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China

⁵Testing & Analysis Center, Soochow University, Jiangsu, China

Angew.Chem.Int.Ed.2017,56,4502–4506

Trimetallic oxyhydroxides are one of the most effective materials for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysis, a key process for water splitting. Herein, we describe a facile wet-chemical method to directly grow a series of coralloid trimetallic oxyhydroxides on arbitrary substrates such as nickel foam (NF) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs). The amount of iron in these oxyhydroxide sponges on NF and CNTs was precisely controlled, revealing that the electrocatalytic activity of the WCoFe trimetallic oxyhydroxides depends on the Fe amount in a volcano-like fashion. The optimized W_0.5Co_0.4Fe_0.1/NF catalyst exhibited an overpotential of only 310mV to deliver a large current density of 100mAcm⁻² and a very low Tafel slope of 32mVdec⁻¹. It also showed superior stability with negligible activity decay after use in the OER for 21days (>500h). X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy revealed that the addition of Fe leads to an on average lower Co oxidation state, which contributes to the enhanced OER performance.

链接：http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201701533/abstract