Intrinsic-structural-modulated carbon cloth as efficient electrocatalyst for water oxidation

Abstract

Efficient metal-free catalysts for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are challenged for enhancing the efficiency of water electrolysis. Here, an extremely simple one-step calcination route is put forward to synthesize free-standing N-doped C electrocatalyst for the OER. The incorporation of N into carbon cloth (CC) can tune the electronic structure around the C sites for enhancing the reaction active sites and electrical conductivity, and optimizing adsorption energies for intermediates. As expected, the as-prepared CC-9NH3-3h electrode demonstrates remarkable OER performance in alkaline medium, affording an extremely low overpotential of 298 mV (@10 mA cm−2) and Tafel slope of 62 mV dec−1, which is comparable to that of a commercial RuO2 and other promising metal-based OER catalysts. Our findings provide opportunities to explore CC as a new class of self-supporting OER electrocatalyst, and to improve its performance by modulating their intrinsic structure.