Quench-induced surface engineering of NiO/NiSex hybrid for highly enhanced electrochemical oxygen evolution reaction

Abstract

To achieve sustainable production of hydrogen fuel through electrochemical water splitting, efficient and low-cost electrocatalysts for the kinetically sluggish oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are urgently desirable. Herein, a calcination-quenching strategy to synthesize core-shell NiO@NiSex nanorods (NiSex is the core and NiO is the shell) with tailored surface compositions and structures is reported. In the calcination step, a NiO@NiSex nanostructure supported on nickel foam (NF) (denoted as NiO@NiSex/NF) was formed via oxidative calcination of highly conductive NiSe in situ grown on NF (denoted as NiSe/NF). Subsequently, the as-obtained NiO@NiSex/NF electrode at the high temperature state was rapidly placed in a cold iron salt solution to achieve the quenching process. The results conclusively demonstrated that the quenching process resulted in iron doping and vacancies generation on the surface of NiO, effectively reconfiguring the desired surface of the catalyst, thus giving rise to notably enhanced electrocatalytic performance for OER in alkaline media. As a result, the quenched-engineered NiO@NiSex/NF electrode requires ultralow overpotentials of 231 and 265 mV to yield current densities of 10 and 100 mA cm−2, respectively, and presents a very low Tafel slope of 28.9 mV dec−1 as well as excellent durability, with the performance superior to most of metal oxide catalysts reported to date. This work extends the use of quenching chemistry in fabrication of high-performance metal oxide catalysts for energy related applications.