Sulfur-Modified Oxygen Vacancies in Iron-Cobalt Oxide Nanosheets: Enabling Extremely High Activity of the Oxygen Evolution Reaction to Achieve the Industrial Water Splitting Benchmark.
Linzhou ZhuangYi Alec JiaHongli LiuZhiheng LiMengran LiLongzhou ZhangXin WangDongjiang YangZhonghua ZhuXiangdong YaoPublished in: Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) (2020)
The oxygen vacancies of defective iron-cobalt oxide (FeCoOx -Vo) nanosheets are modified by the homogeneously distributed sulfur (S) atoms. S atoms can not only effectively stabilize oxygen vacancies (Vo), but also form the Co-S coordination with Co active site in the Vo, which can modulate the electronic structure of the active site, enabling FeCoOx -Vo-S to exhibit much superior OER activity. FeCoOx -Vo-S exhibits a mass activity of 2440.0 A g-1 at 1.5 V vs. RHE in 1.0 m KOH, 25.4 times higher than that of RuO2 . The Tafel slope is as low as 21.0 mV dec-1 , indicative of its excellent charge transfer rate. When FeCoOx -Vo-S (anode catalyst) is paired with the defective CoP3 /Ni2 P (cathode catalyst) for overall water splitting, current densities of as high as 249.0 mA cm-2 and 406.0 mA cm-2 at a cell voltage of 2.0 V and 2.3 V, respectively, can be achieved.