A salt-baking ‘recipe’ of commercial nickel-molybdenum alloy foam for oxygen evolution catalysis in water splitting

Abstract

Ni-based metal foam holds promise as an electrochemical water-splitting catalyst, due to its low cost, acceptable catalytic activity and superior stability. However, its catalytic activity must be improved before it can be used as an energy-saving catalyst. Here, a traditional Chinese recipe, salt-baking, was employed to surface engineering of nickel-molybdenum alloy (NiMo) foam. During salt-baking, a thin layer of FeOOH nano-flowers was assembled on the NiMo foam surface then the resultant NiMo-Fe catalytic material was evaluated for its ability to support oxygen evolution reaction (OER) activity. The NiMo-Fe foam catalyst generated an electric current density of 100 mA cm−2 that required an overpotential of only 280 mV, thus demonstrating that its performance far exceeded that of the benchmark catalyst RuO2 (375 mV). When employed as both the anode and cathode for use in alkaline water electrolysis, the NiMo-Fe foam generated a current density (j) output that was 3.5 times greater than that of NiMo. Thus, our proposed salt-baking method is a promising simple and environmentally friendly approach for surface engineering of metal foam for designing catalysts.