Abstract
Water splitting is thermodynamically uphill reaction, hence it cannot occur easily, and also highly complicated and challenging reaction in chemistry. In electrocatalytic water splitting, the combination of oxygen and hydrogen evolution reactions produces highly clean and sustainable hydrogen energy and which attracts research communities. Also, fabrication of highly active and low cost materials for water splitting is a major challenge. Therefore, in the present study, γ-Fe2O3 nanowires were fabricated from highly available and cost-effective iron plate without any chemical modifications/doping onto the surface of the working electrode with high current density. The fabricated nanowires achieved the current density of 10 mA/cm2 at 1.88 V vs. RHE with the scan rate of 50 mV/sec. Stability measurements of the fabricated Fe2O3 nanowires were monitored up to 3275 sec with the current density of 9.6 mA/cm2 at a constant potential of 1.7 V vs. RHE and scan rate of 50 mV/sec.
Highlights
Renewable energies such as solar, water and wind energies are clean and highly abundant resources which are not depleted by use
The morphology of Fe plate with scratched surface was compared with unscratched Fe plate using Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) analysis (Fig. S1, Supporting Information)
From the images it is observed that the scratched surface (Fig. S1(a)) showed substantial growth of nanowires than unscratched surface (Fig. S1(b)) and the corresponding mechanisms (Fig. S2) for nanowire formation has drawn on the basis of experimental results and previous reports[11,12]
Summary
Renewable energies such as solar, water and wind energies are clean and highly abundant resources which are not depleted by use. Among them iron oxides received greater attention to split water efficiently It is highly abundant, non-toxic to the environment, cost effective and stable in aqueous solution[18,19]. Chandrasekaran et al.[24] employed γ-Fe2O3 with reduced graphene oxide for PEC water splitting and the photocurrent density of the RGO/γ-Fe2O3 nanocomposite was reported as 6.74 mA/cm[2] at 1.80 V vs RHE in 1 M NaOH. Even though these reports are available for electrocatalytic water splitting, still it is challenging to attain greater efficiency at low applied potential through highly available and cost-effective materials. The value obtained from bare Fe2O3 is comparable with previous results, where chemical modifications or doping is necessary[20,21,22,23,24]
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