Flexible bifunctional electrocatalyst (Ni@(Ni,Fe)Se ₂/Ni@CC) by adjusting d-band center for high-efficiency HER and overall water splitting

Abstract

Nickel foam is widely used as a collector for electrocatalysts because of its excellent electrical conductivity; however, it is prone to react with elements such as oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus during the growth of electrode materials, which makes it brittle and fragile, thus limiting its large-scale application. In this study, bifunctional electrocatalysts with flexible multilevel Ni-based nanoclusters Ni@(Ni,Fe)Se₂/Ni@CC were synthesized on carbon cloth (CC) by hydrothermal and electrodeposition methods; these flexible electrocatalysts are convenient for subsequent industrial applications. At a current density of 10 mA cm⁻², the overpotentials of the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) reached 98 and 224 mV, respectively, exceeding the catalytic effects of most metal-based collectors. The overall water-splitting potential of the catalyst was only 1.56 V at 10 mA cm⁻², and the performance was maintained after a 24 h stability test. Ni@(Ni,Fe)Se₂/Ni@CC significantly improved the activity in alkaline environments by modulating the center of the d-band, thereby increasing the adsorption capacity of the catalyst for H ions. In this study, we improved the intrinsic activity and charge transfer of transition metal electrocatalysts by modifying the carbon cloth and constructing multilevel Ni-based nanoclusters, which provided some insights into the rational design of flexible bifunctional electrocatalysts.

Keywords

Flexible bifunctional electrocatalysts / Nickel-based nanoclusters / Multilevel architecture / HER / Overall water splitting

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Wenbo Liao: Writing - original draft, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation. Baojie Zhang: Formal analysis. Lan Mu: Investigation. Ning Zhao: Data curation. Gang Zhao: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Funding acquisition. Junjie Huang: Formal analysis. Xijin Xu: Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition.

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. (No. 51802177), and Joint Funds of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U22A20140), Jinan City-School Integration Development Strategy Project (No. JNSX2023015), and University of Jinan Disciplinary Cross-Convergence Construction Project 2023 (No. XKJC-202309). This project was supported by the State Key Laboratory of Powder Metallurgy at Central South University, Changsha, China. All authors contributed to the preparation, characterization, and analysis of the structures and performance of the materials. All the authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.chphma.2024.05.003.

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