Bimetallic co-doping engineering over nickel-based oxy-hydroxide enables high-performance electrocatalytic oxygen evolution

Ruopeng Li; Penghui Ren; Peixia Yang; Yaqiang Li; Huiling Zhang; Anmin Liu; Shizheng Wen; Jinqiu Zhang; Maozhong An

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2022.11.033

Bimetallic co-doping engineering over nickel-based oxy-hydroxide enables high-performance electrocatalytic oxygen evolution

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2023 Feb;631(Pt B):173-181. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2022.11.033. Epub 2022 Nov 11.

Authors

Ruopeng Li¹, Penghui Ren¹, Peixia Yang², Yaqiang Li¹, Huiling Zhang¹, Anmin Liu³, Shizheng Wen⁴, Jinqiu Zhang¹, Maozhong An⁵

Affiliations

¹ MIIT Key Laboratory of Critical Materials Technology for New Energy Conversion and Storage, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, 150001 Harbin, China.
² MIIT Key Laboratory of Critical Materials Technology for New Energy Conversion and Storage, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, 150001 Harbin, China. Electronic address: yangpeixia@hit.edu.cn.
³ State Key Laboratory of Fine Chemicals, School of Chemical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116086, China.
⁴ School of Physics and Electronic Electrical Engineering, Huaiyin Normal University, Huai'an 223300, China.
⁵ MIIT Key Laboratory of Critical Materials Technology for New Energy Conversion and Storage, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, 150001 Harbin, China; State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China.

PMID: 36401925
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2022.11.033

Abstract

Enhancing the electrocatalytic oxygen evolution reaction (OER) performance is essential to realize practical energy-saving water electrolysis and CO₂ electroreduction. Herein, we report a bimetallic co-doping engineering to design and fabricate nickel-cobalt-iron collaborative oxy-hydroxide on nickel foam that labeled as NiCoFeO_xH_y-NF. As expected, NiCoFeO_xH_y-NF exhibits an outstanding OER activity with current density of 10 mA cm^-2 at 194 mV, Tafel slope of 53 mV dec^-1, along with the robust long-term stability, which is significantly better than bimetallic NiCo and NiFe combinations. Comprehensive computational simulations and characterizations jointly unveil that the twisted ligand environment induced by heteroatoms ensures the balance strength between the metal-oxygen hybrid orbital states and the oxidized intermediates adsorption, thus lowering the oxygen cycling energy barriers for overcoming the sluggish OER kinetics. Moreover, a novel phase transition behavior is monitored by in-situ Raman spectra under OER operating conditions, which facilitates electron-mass transfer as well as boosts the exposure of activity sites. For practical applications, Ni₂P-NF || NiCoFeO_xH_y-NF and Cu || NiCoFeO_xH_y-NF couples were constructed to realize high-efficiency water electrolysis and CO₂ electrochemical reduction for the production of valuable H₂ and C₂H₄, respectively. This work elucidates a novel mechanism by which bimetallic co-doping improves the electrocatalytic OER activity of nickel-based hydroxides.

Keywords: CO(2) electroreduction; Heteroatoms co-doping; Nickel-based oxy-hydroxides; Oxygen evolution reaction; Water electrolysis.