Abstract
It is highly desired to develop low-cost and effective non-precious metal based electrocatalysts for water-to‑hydrogen conversion assisted by urea electro-oxidation reaction. In this work, Ni0-rich Ni/NiO nanocrystals were facilely synthesized on the surface of acid-treated nickel foam via thermal annealing in Ar/H2 (denoted as NF@Acid-H2). The three-dimensional free-standing NF@Acid-H2 electrode exhibited high HER and UOR activities at 156 mV and at 1.33 V to reach the current density of 10 mA/cm2, respectively. The urea electrolyzer needed a cell voltage of 1.49 V to deliver the current density of 10 mA/cm2, and could continuously generate H2 for 20 h with negligible activity loss. Systematic study revealed that the presence of Ni0 played a significant role to improve both HER and UOR performance. In particular, the Ni0-rich Ni/NiO exhibited better catalytic performance than that of Ni0-less counterpart. This work proved that the high urea electrolysis performance was dependent on the rational design of non-precious metal electrocatalysts with controllable compositions and hierarchical nanostructures.
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