Oxygen Plasma Activation of Carbon Nanotubes-Interconnected Prussian Blue Analogue for Oxygen Evolution Reaction

Yin-Chen Lin; Cheng-Hsun Chuang; Li-Yin Hsiao; Min-Hsin Yeh; Kuo-Chuan Ho

doi:10.1021/acsami.0c07821

Oxygen Plasma Activation of Carbon Nanotubes-Interconnected Prussian Blue Analogue for Oxygen Evolution Reaction

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2020 Sep 23;12(38):42634-42643. doi: 10.1021/acsami.0c07821. Epub 2020 Sep 4.

Authors

Yin-Chen Lin¹, Cheng-Hsun Chuang¹, Li-Yin Hsiao¹, Min-Hsin Yeh², Kuo-Chuan Ho^{1

3

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Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
² Department of Chemical Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei 10607, Taiwan.
³ Institute of Polymer Science and Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
⁴ Advanced Research Center for Green Materials Science and Technology, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.

PMID: 32845608
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.0c07821

Abstract

To obtain renewable and clean fuels, exploration of effective electrocatalysts is highly desirable due to the sluggish kinetics of water splitting. In this study, the oxygen plasma-activated hybrid structure of Ni-Fe Prussian blue analogue (PBA) interconnected by carbon nanotubes (O-CNT/NiFe) is reported as a highly effective electrocatalytic material for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The electrocatalytic performance is significantly influenced by different mass ratios of CNTs to Ni-Fe PBA. Benefiting from the conductive and oxygen plasma-activated CNTs as well as ordered and distributed metal sites in the framework, the optimized O-CNT/NiFe 1:18 exhibits a competitive overpotential of 279 mV at a current density of 10 mA cm^-2 and a low Tafel slope of 42.8 mV dec^-1 in 1.0 M KOH. Furthermore, the composite shows superior durability for at least 100 h. These results suggest that the O-CNT/NiFe 1:18 possesses promising potential as a highly active electrocatalyst.

Keywords: carbon nanotubes; electrocatalysis; metal−organic frameworks; oxygen evolution reaction; oxygen plasma treatment.