Affiliations 

  • 1 Jiangsu National Synergetic Innovation Center for Advanced Materials (SICAM) State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering College of Chemical Engineering Nanjing Tech University No. 5 Xin Mofan Road Nanjing 210009 P. R. China
  • 2 Department of Chemical Engineering Curtin University Perth Western Australia 6845 Australia
  • 3 Research Centre for Sustainable Technologies Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Science Swinburne University of Technology Jalan Simpang Tiga Kuching 93350 Sarawak Malaysia
  • 4 Building Energy Research Group Department of Building and Real Estate The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hung Hom Kowloon 999077 Hong Kong China
Adv Sci (Weinh), 2018 Sep;5(9):1800514.
PMID: 30250794 DOI: 10.1002/advs.201800514

Abstract

Hydrogen production from renewable electricity relies upon the development of an efficient alkaline water electrolysis device and, ultimately, upon the availability of low cost and stable electrocatalysts that can promote oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Normally, different electrocatalysts are applied for HER and OER because of their different reaction intermediates and mechanisms. Here, the synthesis of a heterostructured CoP@a-CoOx plate, which constitutes the embedded crystalline cobalt phosphide (CoP) nanoclusters and amorphous cobalt oxides (CoOx) nanoplates matrix, via a combined solvothermal and low temperature phosphidation route is reported. Due to the presence of synergistic effect between CoP nanoclusters and amorphous CoOx nanoplates in the catalyst, created from the strong nanointerfaces electronic interactions between CoP and CoOx phases in its heterostructure, this composite displays very high OER activity in addition to favorable HER activity that is comparable to the performance of the IrO2 OER benchmark and approached that of the Pt/C HER benchmark. More importantly, an efficient and stable alkaline water electrolysis operation is achieved using CoP@a-CoOx plate as both cathode and anode as evidenced by the obtainment of a relatively low potential of 1.660 V at a 10 mA cm-2 current density and its marginal increase above 1.660 V over 30 h continuous operation.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.