Designing hierarchical iron doped nickel-vanadium hydroxide microsphere as an efficient electrocatalyst for oxygen evolution reaction

Yaoyao Deng; Yidong Lu; Rentong Dai; Mei Xiang; Zhenwei Zhang; Xiaoli Zhang; Quanfa Zhou; Hongwei Gu; Jirong Bai

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2022.07.060

Designing hierarchical iron doped nickel-vanadium hydroxide microsphere as an efficient electrocatalyst for oxygen evolution reaction

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2022 Dec:627:215-223. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2022.07.060. Epub 2022 Jul 14.

Authors

Yaoyao Deng¹, Yidong Lu², Rentong Dai¹, Mei Xiang³, Zhenwei Zhang¹, Xiaoli Zhang², Quanfa Zhou¹, Hongwei Gu⁴, Jirong Bai⁵

Affiliations

¹ Research Center of Secondary Resources and Environment, School of Chemical Engineering and Materials, Changzhou Institute of Technology, Changzhou 213032, China.
² Key Laboratory of Organic Synthesis of Jiangsu Province, College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science & Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, P. R. China.
³ Research Center of Secondary Resources and Environment, School of Chemical Engineering and Materials, Changzhou Institute of Technology, Changzhou 213032, China. Electronic address: xiangm@czu.cn.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Organic Synthesis of Jiangsu Province, College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science & Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, P. R. China. Electronic address: hongwei@suda.edu.cn.
⁵ Research Center of Secondary Resources and Environment, School of Chemical Engineering and Materials, Changzhou Institute of Technology, Changzhou 213032, China. Electronic address: baijr@cit.edu.cn.

PMID: 35849855
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2022.07.060

Abstract

Exploring highly active and inexpensive electrocatalysts for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is considered to be one of the preconditions for the development of energy and environment-related technologies. Nickel-based layered double hydroxides (LDHs) are extensively-studied OER electrocatalysts, but they still require relatively high overpotentials to achieve threshold current densities. In this work, iron-doped nickel-vanadium hydroxide microspheres (Fe-doped NiV HMS) were synthesized by doping iron ions into the NiV HMS through a facile cation-exchange method. The Fe-doped NiV HMS are hollow hierarchical structure stacked by high-density perpendicularly-lying nanosheets, which provide enough space for electrolyte penetration and diffusion. Owing to optimized composition and hollow hierarchical structure, the Fe-doped NiV HMS exhibits excellent electrocatalytic performance, which possessed a very low running overpotential (255 mV at 10 mA cm^-2) and a smallest Tafel slope (56 mV dec^-1) compared with hierarchical NiV HMS toward OER. Electrochemical results and density functional theory (DFT) manifest that Fe doping could regulate the electronic structure of NiV HMS, thus improving its electrical conductivity and electron transfer rate, and thus enhancing its catalytic activity. This research provides a convenient way to prepare Ni-based hydroxides as promising OER catalysts.

Keywords: Fe doping; Hollow hierarchical microsphere; Layered double hydroxide; Oxygen evolution reaction.