Single-crystal nanoporous high-entropy (oxy)hydroxides nanosheets for electrocatalysis: Structure and electronic dual enhancement

Abstract

High-entropy materials are new-fashioned electrocatalysts due to their interesting “cocktail effect”. However, it is still a great challenge to synthesize single-crystal high-entropy nanomaterials such as (oxy)hydroxides due to the different crystal growth mode for different elements. Herein, we design a dynamic crystal growth strategy by multi-cation exchange to fabricate single-crystal high-entropy (oxy)hydroxides nanosheets. Nanoporous morphology can be achieved by incorporating Al ion into the multicomponent (oxy)hydroxides system after a reversible Al insertion-dissolution process. When adopted as potential electrocatalysts for oxygen evolution reaction (OER), we find that the seven-component ZnVNiCoFeAlRu-OHs single-crystal nanoporous nanosheets display a significantly improved OER performance with a low overpotential of 229 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and a shallow Tafel slope of 39.3 mV dec−1. Both XPS and DFT calculation reveal that Ru acted an electron dedicator could effectively moderate the overall electronic structures for better OER performance. This work develops an entropy and enthalpy driven multi-cation exchange strategy for synthesizing a library of single-crystal high-entropy (oxy)hydroxides for various applications.