Electrocatalytic performance of cobalt oxide and hybrid composite thin films of cobalt Oxide@Polyaniline for oxygen evolution reaction

Abstract

Water splitting is the process in which oxygen evolution reaction is prominent. This can be done by the most affordable technique using an electric field (electrochemical method). Keeping this in mind, we have synthesized novel hybrid composite thin films of Co3O4@PANI, to overcome the deficient electrochemical performance of solo Co3O4. The electrocatalytic performance of cobalt oxide and hybrid composite material for oxygen evolution reaction is studied. Cobalt oxide is deposited by the SILAR method, and hybrid composite material is prepared via different methods like electrochemical deposition and SILAR. Morphology, charge transfer resistance, and phase of material are studied with Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) respectively. The hybrid composite Co3O4@PANI electrocatalyst manifests high catalytic activity with 258 mV overpotential at 10 mA cm−2 current while solo Co3O4 shows deficient catalytic activity with 323 mV overpotential at 10 mA cm−2 which is examined by Linear swap voltammetry (LSV) and 16.28 mV dec-1 is Tafel slope. This hybrid combination also shows excellent stability for 10 hrs for OER in 1 M NaOH.