Necklace-like Multishelled Hollow Spinel Oxides with Oxygen Vacancies for Efficient Water Electrolysis
- 14 September 2018
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Chemical Society (ACS) in Journal of the American Chemical Society
- Vol. 140 (42), 13644-13653
- https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.8b05134
Abstract
The durability and reactivity of catalysts can be effectively and precisely controlled through the careful design and engineering of their surface structures and morphologies. Herein, we develop a novel “adsorption–calcination–reduction” strategy to synthesize spinel transitional metal oxides with a unique necklace-like multishelled hollow structure exploiting sacrificial templates of carbonaceous microspheres, including NiCo2O4 (NCO), CoMn2O4, and NiMn2O4. Importantly, benefiting from the unique structures and reduction treatment to offer rich oxygen vacancies, the unique reduced NCO (R-NCO) as a bifunctional electrocatalyst exhibits the dual characteristics of good stability as well as high electrocatalytic activity for both the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). At 1.61 V cell voltage, a 10 mA cm–2 water splitting current density is obtained from the dual-electrode, alkaline water electrolyzer. Calculations based on density functional theory (DFT) reveal a mechanism for the promotion of the catalytic reactions based on a decrease in the energy barrier for the formation of intermediates resulting from the introduction of oxygen vacancies through the reduction process. This method could prove to be an effective general strategy for the preparation of complex, hollow structures and functionalities.Funding Information
- State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs (B12015)
- Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (NS2018040, B12015, NE2017004)
- Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20170793, BK20180015)
- National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF-CRP10-2012-06)
- Government of Jiangsu Province
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (21542017)
This publication has 59 references indexed in Scilit:
- Efficient Hydrogen Evolution on Cu Nanodots-Decorated Ni3S2 Nanotubes by Optimizing Atomic Hydrogen Adsorption and DesorptionJournal of the American Chemical Society, 2018
- Highly controlled synthesis of multi-shelled NiO hollow microspheres for enhanced lithium storage propertiesMaterials Research Bulletin, 2017
- Recent Progress in Cobalt‐Based Heterogeneous Catalysts for Electrochemical Water SplittingAdvanced Materials, 2015
- Controllable synthesis of mesostructures from TiO2 hollow to porous nanospheres with superior rate performance for lithium ion batteriesChemical Science, 2015
- An efficient molybdenum disulfide/cobalt diselenide hybrid catalyst for electrochemical hydrogen generationNature Communications, 2015
- Metal–Organic Framework Derived Hybrid Co3O4-Carbon Porous Nanowire Arrays as Reversible Oxygen Evolution ElectrodesJournal of the American Chemical Society, 2014
- Self-Supported Nanoporous Cobalt Phosphide Nanowire Arrays: An Efficient 3D Hydrogen-Evolving Cathode over the Wide Range of pH 0–14Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2014
- Engineering the surface structure of MoS2 to preferentially expose active edge sites for electrocatalysisNature Materials, 2012
- Facile synthesis of core–shell Au@CeO2 nanocomposites with remarkably enhanced catalytic activity for CO oxidationEnergy & Environmental Science, 2012
- Solar Water Splitting CellsChemical Reviews, 2010