An effective strategy for fabricating highly dispersed nanoparticles on O-C3N4 with enhanced electrocatalytic activity and stability

Abstract

Uniform distribution of nanoparticles (NPs) with small particle size is hardly controllable, which has an impact on the electrocatalytic properties. In this work, CoFe2O4/oxygen-doped graphitic carbon nitrogen (O-C3N4) was synthesized by glycine-nitrate combustion method, which has many advantages such as high compositional homogeneity and fine particle size. O-C3N4 as a support possessing abundant oxygenated functional groups can provide more active sites for anchoring metal ions, and effectively avoid or minimize the growth and aggregation of CoFe2O4 NPs. As a result, CoFe2O4 NPs with a number-mean particle size of 5.06 ± 0.42 nm were homogeneously fabricated on the surface of O-C3N4. Moreover, the performance of catalysis was estimated using oxygen evolution reaction (OER) as a model system. The OER performance was remarkably improved including long-term stability and the overpotential of CoFe2O4/O-C3N4 hybrid for 10 mA/cm2 current densities with a decrease of 131 mV and 61 mV compared with CoFe2O4 and CoFe2O4/graphitic carbon nitrogen (g-C3N4) hybrid, respectively. These indicate that oxygenated functional groups on O-C3N4 not only leads to homogeneous distribution of CoFe2O4 NPs, but also improves the performance for OER. Finally, O-C3N4 could act as a novel support to enhance the dispersion of NPs for the further application in catalysis.