Issue 16, 2022

Chemical etching induced microporous nickel backbones decorated with metallic Fe@hydroxide nanocatalysts: an efficient and sustainable OER anode toward industrial alkaline water-splitting

Abstract

Development of cost-effective and highly efficient electrocatalysts for water splitting is crucial to produce affordable and sustainable green-hydrogen energy that can alleviate the current overreliance on fossil fuels. This work demonstrates the simple immersion-based chemical etching of nickel foam (NF) in an ethanolic FeCl3 solution to generate microporous nickel (Ni) backbones decorated with hierarchically structured metallic Fe doped Ni–Fe-hydroxide nanoparticles serving as a highly promising oxygen evolution reaction (OER) electrode in alkaline water. The optimally etched NF-based OER electrode exhibits a low Tafel slope of 47.3 mV dec−1 and a low overpotential of 220, 270, and 310 mV at 10, 100, and 500 mA cm−2, respectively. Intriguingly, this electrode also exhibits a perfectly reversible OER and HER performance between +400 and −40 mA cm−2 with no evidence of electrode potential decay for 80 h. Importantly, when used with an industrial-type 30 wt% KOH aqueous electrolyte and compared to a benchmark Pt/C(20wt%)‖IrO2-based cell, the electrolyzer exhibits a lower cell voltage of 1.52 (vs. 1.56 V of Pt/C(20wt%)‖IrO2-cell), 1.62 (vs. 1.79), 1.69 (vs. 1.92) and 1.79 (vs. 2.08) V at 10, 50, 100, and 240 mA cm−2, respectively, with the cell voltage maintained for ∼100 h.

Graphical abstract: Chemical etching induced microporous nickel backbones decorated with metallic Fe@hydroxide nanocatalysts: an efficient and sustainable OER anode toward industrial alkaline water-splitting

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
25 nov. 2021
Accepted
20 mar. 2022
First published
21 mar. 2022

J. Mater. Chem. A, 2022,10, 8989-9000

Chemical etching induced microporous nickel backbones decorated with metallic Fe@hydroxide nanocatalysts: an efficient and sustainable OER anode toward industrial alkaline water-splitting

N. K. Shrestha, S. A. Patil, J. Han, S. Cho, A. I. Inamdar, H. Kim and H. Im, J. Mater. Chem. A, 2022, 10, 8989 DOI: 10.1039/D1TA10103J

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