Interface-Coupling of NiFe-LDH on Exfoliated Black Phosphorus for the High-Performance Electrocatalytic Oxygen Evolution Reaction

Jinchen Fan; Xi Qin; Wendan Jiang; Xiaolei Lu; Xueling Song; Wenyao Guo; Sheng Zhu

doi:10.3389/fchem.2022.951639

Interface-Coupling of NiFe-LDH on Exfoliated Black Phosphorus for the High-Performance Electrocatalytic Oxygen Evolution Reaction

Front Chem. 2022 Jul 7:10:951639. doi: 10.3389/fchem.2022.951639. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Jinchen Fan^{1

2}, Xi Qin², Wendan Jiang², Xiaolei Lu¹, Xueling Song¹, Wenyao Guo², Sheng Zhu²

Affiliations

¹ School of Materials and Chemistry, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China.
² Shanghai Key Laboratory of Materials Protection and Advanced Materials in Electric Power, College of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai University of Electric Power, Shanghai, China.

Abstract

Electrochemical oxygen evolution reaction (OER) always plays an important role in many electrochemical energy storage and conversion systems. Owing to the slow kinetics mainly brought from multiple proton-coupled electron transfer steps, the design and exploit low-cost, highly active, durable OER electrocatalysts are of significant importance. Although the black phosphorus (BP) shows good electrocatalytic OER performance, it still faces the problems of poor intrinsic activity and low stability due to its instability under ambient conditions. The NiFe-LDH was assembled onto the surfaces of exfoliated BP (EBP) nanoflakes to realize the interfacial coupling between them, achieving an effective improvement in electrocatalytic activity and stability. Benefitting from the interfacial P-O bonding, the NiFe-LDH@EBP hybrid shows high OER activity with a low overpotential of ∼240 mV@10 mA cm^-2 toward OER under alkaline conditions, as well as the good stability. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations proved that the interface-coupling of NiFe-LDH on BP promotes charge transfer kinetics and balances the adsorption/desorption of reaction intermediates, ultimately imparting excellent OER electrocatalytic activity.

Keywords: NiFe LDH; black phosphorus; charge transfer; interface-coupling; oxygen evolution reaction.