Tailoring the Activity of Electrocatalytic Methanol Oxidation on Cobalt Hydroxide by the Incorporation of Catalytically Inactive Zinc Ions

Shuai Jiang; Mian Wu; Tongyao Xiao; Xianjun Yin; Qiang Gao; Cui Xu; Mengyang Zhang; Hui-Qing Peng; Bin Liu

doi:10.1021/acsami.3c13624

Tailoring the Activity of Electrocatalytic Methanol Oxidation on Cobalt Hydroxide by the Incorporation of Catalytically Inactive Zinc Ions

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2023 Dec 6;15(48):55870-55876. doi: 10.1021/acsami.3c13624. Epub 2023 Nov 27.

Authors

Shuai Jiang¹, Mian Wu¹, Tongyao Xiao¹, Xianjun Yin¹, Qiang Gao¹, Cui Xu¹, Mengyang Zhang¹, Hui-Qing Peng¹, Bin Liu¹

Affiliation

¹ State Key Laboratory of Chemical Resource Engineering, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Soft Matter Science and Engineering, College of Chemistry, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, P. R. China.

PMID: 38010202
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.3c13624

Abstract

Catalytically inactive Zn²⁺ is incorporated into cobalt hydroxide to synthesize hierarchical ZnCo-layered double hydroxide nanosheet networks supported on carbon fiber (ZnCo-LDH/CF). The incorporation of Zn²⁺ is revealed to endow ZnCo-LDH/CF with significantly superior performance in the aspects of the activity and selectivity for methanol electrooxidation to formic acid and the boosting effect for cathodic hydrogen production compared with the counterpart without Zn²⁺. Density functional theory (DFT) calculation reveals that the incorporation of nonactive Zn²⁺ can increase the density of states near the Fermi level of LDH (i.e., elevate electrical conductivity to form favorable charge transportation during electrocatalysis) and promote the adsorption and subsequent cleavage of methanol, thus leading to the enhanced methanol electrooxidation performance.

Keywords: electronic structure regulation; hydrogen production; layered double hydroxide; methanol electrooxidation to formic acid; nonactive ion incorporation; photovoltaic electrolysis.