Construction of NiFe-Layered Double Hydroxides Arrays as Robust Electrocatalyst for Oxygen Evolution Reaction

Abstract

Electrochemical water splitting is considered to be an important method for efficient hydrogen production to alleviate energy shortage and environmental pollution, but its development is currently limited by the slow oxygen evolution reaction (OER). To solve the sluggish reaction kinetics of OER, the focus is on the exploration of low-cost and efficient electrocatalysts, which is quite significant for the development of electrochemical water splitting. Herein, a NiFe layered double hydroxides (LDH) electrocatalyst (denoted as FNH) is achieved by a simple one-step hydrothermal method. The experimental results show that due to the synergistic interaction of introduced Fe species, the FNH possesses a special three-dimensional (3D) vertical nanosheet array structure, which results in efficient ion access. More importantly, the strong electronic interaction between Fe and Ni sites results in the optimized electronic structure of the Ni sites, which not only generates abundant Ni3+ sites as optimized active sites for OER, but also decrease the charge transfer resistance. Thus, the FNH catalyst exhibits an extraordinary overpotential of 386.8 mV to deliver 100 mA cm−2, showing better activity than that of RuO2, and satisfactory cycling stability after continuous operation for 28 h. Our work provides an easy-to-implement method to obtain high-efficiency OER electrocatalysts.