Issue 1, 2024

Oxygen defect engineering on low-crystalline iron(iii) oxyhydroxide as a highly efficient electrocatalyst for water oxidation

Abstract

Improving the water oxidation performance of non-precious nanoelectrocatalysts is the key to developing green hydrogen energy. Herein, we developed a simple method to synthesize FeOOH nanocatalysts with low crystallinity and oxygen vacancies (VO). These catalysts demonstrate excellent electrocatalytic performance for water oxidation. The VO-FeOOH catalyst exhibits an overpotential of 255 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and maintains stability for more than 120 hours at a high current output (50 mA cm−2). DFT calculations show that the rate-determining step (RDS) of VO-FeOOH and FeOOH is O* to OOH* (the Gibbs free energy (ΔG) of the RDS is 1.65 eV and 1.91 eV, respectively). This result indicates that VO can effectively reduce the energy barrier from *O to *OOH of the OER process, thus improving the activity of the VO-FeOOH nanocatalysts. Our focus was on utilizing one of the abundant metallic elements to fabricate defect-rich OER electrocatalysts with improved performance through a convenient one-step synthesis approach. This methodology shows great promise for the development of high-performance catalysts.

Graphical abstract: Oxygen defect engineering on low-crystalline iron(iii) oxyhydroxide as a highly efficient electrocatalyst for water oxidation

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Research Article
Submitted
07 10 2023
Accepted
08 11 2023
First published
09 11 2023

Inorg. Chem. Front., 2024,11, 114-122

Oxygen defect engineering on low-crystalline iron(III) oxyhydroxide as a highly efficient electrocatalyst for water oxidation

Y. Fan, J. Zhang, K. Luo, X. Zhou, J. Zhao, W. Bao, H. Su, N. Wang, P. Zhang and Z. Luo, Inorg. Chem. Front., 2024, 11, 114 DOI: 10.1039/D3QI02043F

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