Carbon nanorod supported metal alloy nanocubes using polydopamine as location reagent for water splitting

Abstract

Transition metal catalysts were supposed to be the most likely substitute for commercial noble metal catalysts, and the development of highly active and long-term catalyst for water splitting are the future trend. Herein, Ni rectangular nitrogen doped carbon nanorods@Fe–Co nanocubes (Ni-CNRs@Fe–Co cubes) were fabricated via a facile template-free method. This simple strategy not only realizes the structure tailoring, but also achieves high-quality nitrogen-doping. Specifically, nickel dimethylglyoxime [Ni(dmg)2] with rectangular rodlike structure was firstly synthesized by solution method, then metal-organic frameworks Fe–Co nanocube with different contents were loaded on rectangular carbon nanorods with polydopamine as the locating and the connecting agent, and finally Ni-CNRs@xFe-Co cubes were obtained by a one-step calcination. A series of electrochemical tests were researched on materials with different metal contents in the 1 M KOH solution. The Ni-CNRs@Fe–Co cubes show excellent electrocatalytic activity in the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). For HER and OER, the Tafel slopes were 83.3 mV dec−1 and 71 mV dec−1, the onset potential were −167 mV and 1.62 V, and reached the current densities of 10 mA cm−2, the overpotential just needed 196 mV and 433 mV, respectively. This novel synthetic strategy will provide a template-free way for cheap electrocatalysts of non-precious metal for OER and HER.