Trimetallic Oxyhydroxide Coralloids for Efficient Oxygen Evolution Electrocatalysis

Abstract

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_0.5 Co_0.4 Fe_0.1 /NF catalyst exhibited an overpotential of only 310 mV to deliver a large current density of 100 mA cm^-2 and a very low Tafel slope of 32 mV dec^-1 . It also showed superior stability with negligible activity decay after use in the OER for 21 days (>500 h). 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.

Keywords: coralloid structures; electrocatalysis; oxygen evolution; trimetallic oxyhydroxides.