Journal of Advanced Ceramics (Mar 2023)

Honeycomb-like MXene/NiFePx–NC with "continuous" single-crystal enabling high activity and robust durability in electrocatalytic oxygen evolution reactions

  • Xiaojun Zeng,
  • Yifei Ye,
  • Yongqing Wang,
  • Ronghai Yu,
  • Martin Moskovits,
  • Galen D. Stucky

DOI
https://doi.org/10.26599/JAC.2023.9220704
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12, no. 3
pp. 553 – 564

Abstract

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The development of low-cost, stable, and robust non-noble metal catalysts for water oxidation is a pivotal challenge for sustainable hydrogen production through electrocatalytic water splitting. Currently, such catalysts suffer from high overpotential and sluggish kinetics in oxygen evolution reactions (OERs). Herein, we report a "continuous" single-crystal honeycomb-like MXene/NiFePx–N-doped carbon (NC) heterostructure, in which ultrasmall NiFePx nanoparticles (NPs) encapsulated in the NC are tightly anchored on a layered MXene. Interestingly, this MXene/NiFePx–NC delivers outstanding OER catalytic performance, which stems from "continuous" single-crystal characteristics, abundant active sites derived from the ultrasmall NiFePx NPs, and the stable honeycomb-like heterostructure with an open structure. The experimental results are rationalized theoretically (by density functional theory (DFT) calculations), which suggests that it is the unique MXene/NiFePx–NC heterostructure that promotes the sluggish OER, thereby enabling superior durability and excellent activity with an ultralow overpotential of 240 mV at a current density of 10 mA·cm−2.

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