Synthesis of amorphous trimetallic PdCuNiP nanoparticles for enhanced OER

Yangzi Zheng; Ruiyun Guo; Xiang Li; Tianou He; Weicong Wang; Qi Zhan; Rui Li; Ke Zhang; Shangdong Ji; Mingshang Jin

doi:10.3389/fchem.2023.1122333

Synthesis of amorphous trimetallic PdCuNiP nanoparticles for enhanced OER

Front Chem. 2023 Jan 30:11:1122333. doi: 10.3389/fchem.2023.1122333. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Yangzi Zheng¹, Ruiyun Guo², Xiang Li³, Tianou He¹, Weicong Wang¹, Qi Zhan¹, Rui Li¹, Ke Zhang¹, Shangdong Ji¹, Mingshang Jin¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Frontier Institute of Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China.
² School of Materials Science and Engineering, Xi'an University of Science and Technology, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China.
³ Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Functional Materials and Devices, School of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, Xi'an Technological University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China.

Abstract

Metal phosphides with multi-element components and amorphous structure represent a novel kind of electrocatalysts for promising activity and durability towards the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). In this work, a two-step strategy, including alloying and phosphating processes, is reported to synthesize trimetallic amorphous PdCuNiP phosphide nanoparticles for efficient OER under alkaline conditions. The synergistic effect between Pd, Cu, Ni, and P elements, as well as the amorphous structure of the obtained PdCuNiP phosphide nanoparticles, would boost the intrinsic catalytic activity of Pd nanoparticles towards a wide range of reactions. These obtained trimetallic amorphous PdCuNiP phosphide nanoparticles exhibit long-term stability, nearly a 20-fold increase in mass activity toward OER compared with the initial Pd nanoparticles, and 223 mV lower in overpotential at 10 mA cm^-2. This work not only provides a reliable synthetic strategy for multi-metallic phosphide nanoparticles, but also expands the potential applications of this promising class of multi-metallic amorphous phosphides.

Keywords: amorphous; core-shell; electrocatalysis; palladium; phosphide.

Grants and funding

This work is sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, 22171217, 51888103, and 21773180), the Distinguished Young Scholars in Shaanxi Province (no:2023-JC-JQ-12), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2021M692547), the Natural Science Basic Research Program of Shaanxi (2022JQ-105, 2023-JC-QN-0161), and the Science Research Program Funded by Shaanxi Provincial Education Department (22JK0461).