Charge-Polarized Selenium Vacancy in Nickel Diselenide Enabling Efficient and Stable Electrocatalytic Conversion of Oxygen to Hydrogen Peroxide.

Abstract

Vacancy engineering is deemed as one of the powerful protocols to tune the catalytic activity of electrocatalysts. Herein, Se-vacancy with charge polarization is created in the NiSe2 structure (NiSe2 -VSe ) via a sequential phase conversion strategy. By a combined analysis of the Rietveld method, transient photovoltage spectra (TPV), in situ Raman and density functional theory (DFT) calculation, it is unequivocally discovered that the presence of charge-polarized Se-vacancy is beneficial for stabilizing the structure, decreasing the electron transfer kinetics, as well as optimizing the free adsorption energy of reaction intermediate during two-electron oxygen reduction reaction (2e- ORR). Benefiting from these merits, the as-prepared NiSe2 -VSe delivered the highest selectivity of 96% toward H2 O2 in alkaline media, together with a selectivity higher than 90% over the wide potential range from 0.25 to 0.55V, ranking it in the top level among the previously reported transition metal-based electrocatalysts. Most notably, it also displayed admirable stability with only a slight selectivity decay after 5000 cycles of accelerated degradation test (ADT).