Selective growth of graphdiyne-based vanadium-iridium oxide interfaces for efficient alkaline oxygen evolution reaction

Abstract

Electrocatalytic water splitting is a green and sustainable solution for hydrogen production, but its overall performance is still limited by the sluggish and inefficient oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Here, we report the controlled growth of vanadium-iridium oxides (VIrO_x) on the surface of graphdiyne (GDY) to generate well-defined interfaces between GDY and VIrO_x. The scanning electron microscopy and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy images showed the successful growth and uniform distribution of VIrO_x quantum dots on the surface of the GDY nanosheets. The X-ray photoelectron spectra revealed that efficient charge transfer occurred at the interfaces between GDY and VIrO_x quantum dots and led to the formation of mixed-valence metal species. These catalyst advantages notably increased the number of active sites and improved the overall intrinsic activity of the system, resulting in excellent electrocatalytic OER performance with a low overpotential of 121 mV at 10 mA cm⁻², high turnover frequency of 0.914 s⁻¹ at 300 mV, and long-term stability (100 h at 100 mA cm^-2) in alkaline electrolytes.

Keywords

Graphdiyne / Carbon materials / Water splitting / Electrocatalysis / Oxygen evolution reaction

Declaration of Competing Interest

Yuliang Li is the Editor-in-Chief for ChemPhysMater and the guest editor for the special issue on “Fundament and Application of 2D Graphdiyne”, and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article. 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

Yunhao Zheng: Writing - original draft, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Yurui Xue: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis. Yang Gao: Formal analysis. Siao Chen: Formal analysis. Siyi Chen: Formal analysis. Yuliang Li: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Conceptualization.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Basic Science Center Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22388101), the National Key Research and Development Project of China (2022YFA1204500, 2022YFA1204501, 2022YFA1204503, 2018YFA0703501), and the Key Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDPB13).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.chphma.2024.12.003.

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