Iron-nickel aerogels anchored on GO nanosheets as efficient oxygen evolution reaction catalysts under industrial conditions

Abstract

The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) has been acknowledged as a bottleneck in electrocatalytic water splitting due to its sluggish kinetic, so it is eager to search for non-precious metal catalysts with high activity and stability. Herein, we demonstrate a facile strategy to obtain a nickel-iron-aerogels and graphene oxide composite, grown on nickel foam (NiFe@GO/NF) via a mild sol-gel method. The aerogels with the three-dimensional cross-linked networks are successfully anchored to graphene oxide (GO) nanosheets, which greatly increases the specific surface area of aerogels (242.4 m2 g−1) and effectively avoids the agglomeration of the cross-linked networks. Benefited from the special composite morphology and the synergistic effect of NiFe-bimetal and GO, the NiFe@GO/NF driving a 10 mA cm−2 only requires a low overpotential of 233 mV in 1 M KOH. Surprisingly, the NiFe@GO/NF shows considerable OER performance in industrial operating environments (6 M KOH and 50 °C). Thus, the NiFe@GO/NF could be a very promising electrocatalyst for water oxidation.