Abstract
Water electrolysis is an advanced energy conversion technology to produce hydrogen as a clean and sustainable chemical fuel, which potentially stores the abundant but intermittent renewable energy sources scalably. Since the overall water splitting is an uphill reaction in low efficiency, innovative breakthroughs are desirable to greatly improve the efficiency by rationally designing non-precious metal-based robust bifunctional catalysts for promoting both the cathodic hydrogen evolution and anodic oxygen evolution reactions. We report a hybrid catalyst constructed by iron and dinickel phosphides on nickel foams that drives both the hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions well in base, and thus substantially expedites overall water splitting at 10 mA cm−2 with 1.42 V, which outperforms the integrated iridium (IV) oxide and platinum couple (1.57 V), and are among the best activities currently. Especially, it delivers 500 mA cm−2 at 1.72 V without decay even after the durability test for 40 h, providing great potential for large-scale applications.
Highlights
Water electrolysis is an advanced energy conversion technology to produce hydrogen as a clean and sustainable chemical fuel, which potentially stores the abundant but intermittent renewable energy sources scalably
The alternative, low-cost alkaline water electrolysis, is a mature technology for large-scale hydrogen production that is low-cost due to compatibility with non-noble catalysts, but it suffers from low production rates[9,10]
Typical scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images show that the as-prepared samples are free-standing with abundant mesopores and/or nanopores at the surface (Fig. 1a and b), indicating efficacious achievement of large surface areas for facile exchange of proton or oxygen-containing intermediates[5,23]
Summary
Water electrolysis is an advanced energy conversion technology to produce hydrogen as a clean and sustainable chemical fuel, which potentially stores the abundant but intermittent renewable energy sources scalably. We report a hybrid catalyst constructed by iron and dinickel phosphides on nickel foams that drives both the hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions well in base, and substantially expedites overall water splitting at 10 mA cm−2 with 1.42 V, which outperforms the integrated iridium (IV) oxide and platinum couple (1.57 V), and are among the best activities currently. It delivers 500 mA cm−2 at 1.72 V without decay even after the durability test for 40 h, providing great potential for large-scale applications.
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