Abstract
Development of highly efficient oxygen evolution reaction (OER) electrocatalysts is a critical challenge in the cost-effective generation of clean fuels. Here, a metal-free tyramine functionalized graphene oxide (T-GO) electrocatalyst is proposed to use in alkaline electrolytes for enhanced OER. Moreover, the T-GO and GO nanomaterials are well characterized by SEM, XRD, FTIR, XPS and Raman spectroscopy. T-GO exhibits an electrocatalytic OER with a current density of 2 mA cm−2 at a low onset potential of ∼1.39 V and a small Tafel slope of about 69 mV dec−1 and GO exhibits an onset potential of 1.51 V and Tafel slope of about 92 mV dec−1. Additionally, the current stability and RRDE based diffusion controlled response of the T-GO electrocatalyst are outstanding compared to GO. This study establishes metal free T-GO as an efficient electrocatalyst for the OER and used for cathodic production of hydrogen as a counter reaction in the field of water splitting.
Highlights
Energy crises and environmental pollution are among the most important issues worldwide and affect every country
The representative Scanning electron microscopic (SEM) image of tyramine functionalized graphene oxide (T-Graphene oxide (GO)) shown in Fig. 1(b) supports the above conclusion
The FTIR spectra of GO and T-GO are shown in Fig. 2(b), where the sharp peaks corresponding to O–H stretching centred at 3442 cmÀ1 are related to adsorbed water molecules and associated with alcoholic and carboxylic acid functional groups
Summary
Energy crises and environmental pollution are among the most important issues worldwide and affect every country. Recent research has tended to focus on development of alternatives to these expensive metal based systems, for example, carbon nanostructures with heteroatoms like sulphide, phosphide, metal oxides, etc These materials are cost effective and have been commercialized.10b,18,26 Nanostructured catalysts are of great utility because of the reduced electrode content and high catalytically active surface area achieved by a large surface area to volume ratio. It is an extremely important challenge to develop new, facile and highly reproducible electrocatalytic systems for further enhancement of the OER performance using metal-free carbon-based nanomaterials with abundant active sites and large surface area at the nanoscale. Our electrochemical OER catalyst in alkaline medium outperforms other reported systems from the literature
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