Tellurium Triggered Formation of Te/Fe-NiOOH Nanocubes as an Efficient Bifunctional Electrocatalyst for Overall Water Splitting

Shumaila Ibraheem; Xiuting Li; Syed Shoaib Ahmad Shah; Tayyaba Najam; Ghulam Yasin; Rashid Iqbal; Shahid Hussain; Weiyuan Ding; Farrukh Shahzad

doi:10.1021/acsami.0c22573

Tellurium Triggered Formation of Te/Fe-NiOOH Nanocubes as an Efficient Bifunctional Electrocatalyst for Overall Water Splitting

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2021 Mar 10;13(9):10972-10978. doi: 10.1021/acsami.0c22573. Epub 2021 Feb 27.

Authors

Shumaila Ibraheem^{1

2}, Xiuting Li¹, Syed Shoaib Ahmad Shah^{3

4}, Tayyaba Najam^{1

2}, Ghulam Yasin^{1

2}, Rashid Iqbal^{1

2}, Shahid Hussain⁵, Weiyuan Ding^{1

2}, Farrukh Shahzad⁶

Affiliations

¹ Institute for Advanced Study, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China.
² Institute of Microscale Optoelectronics, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China.
³ Department of Chemistry, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur 63100, Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
⁴ Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, CAS Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Chemistry, School of Chemistry and Materials Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, P.R. China.
⁵ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China.
⁶ School of Economics and Management, Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology, Maoming, Guangdong 525000, China.

PMID: 33641328
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.0c22573

Abstract

The electrocatalyzed oxygen and hydrogen evolution reactions (OER/HER) are the key constituents of water splitting toward hydrogen production over electrolysis. The development of stable non-noble nanomaterials as bifunctional OER/HER electrocatalysts is the foremost bottleneck to commercial applications. Herein, the fabrication of Te-modulated FeNiOOH nanocubes (NCs) by a novel tailoring approach is reported, and the doping of Te superbly modulated the local electronic structures of Fe and Ni. The Te/FeNiOOH-NC catalyst displays better mass and electron transfer ability, exposure of plentiful OER/HER edge active centers on the surface, and a modulated electronic structure. Accordingly, the as-made Te/FeNiOOH-NC catalyst reveals robust OER activity (overpotential of 0.22 V@10 mA cm^-2) and HER activity (overpotential of 0.167 V@10 mA cm^-2) in alkaline media. Considerably, this bifunctional catalyst facilitates a high-performance alkaline water electrolyzer with a cell voltage of 1.65 V at 10 mA cm^-2. This strategy opens up a new way for designing and advancing the tellurium dopant nanomaterials for various applications.

Keywords: bifunctional; hydrogen evolution reaction; overall water splitting; oxygen evolution reaction; synergistic electrocatalysis.