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Published June 29, 2018 | Version Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

High-performance bifunctional porous non-noble metal phosphide catalyst for overall water splitting

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon University of Houston
  • 2. ROR icon Hunan Normal University
  • 3. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Water electrolysis is an advanced energy conversion technology to produce hydrogen as a clean and sustainable chemical fuel, which potentially stores the abundant but intermittent renewable energy sources scalably. Since the overall water splitting is an uphill reaction in low efficiency, innovative breakthroughs are desirable to greatly improve the efficiency by rationally designing non-precious metal-based robust bifunctional catalysts for promoting both the cathodic hydrogen evolution and anodic oxygen evolution reactions. We report a hybrid catalyst constructed by iron and dinickel phosphides on nickel foams that drives both the hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions well in base, and thus substantially expedites overall water splitting at 10 mA cm⁻² with 1.42 V, which outperforms the integrated iridium (IV) oxide and platinum couple (1.57 V), and are among the best activities currently. Especially, it delivers 500 mA cm⁻² at 1.72 V without decay even after the durability test for 40 h, providing great potential for large-scale applications.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2018. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 27 November 2017; Accepted 17 May 2018; Published 29 June 2018. This project has been partially supported by the US Department of Energy under a grant DE-SC0010831. J.S. and S.C. also express their acknowledgements to the support from TcSUH as the TcSUH Robert A. Welch Professorships in High Temperature Superconducting (HTSg) and Chemical Materials (E-0001). W.A.G. and Y.H. acknowledge support from NSF (CBET 1512759). The calculations were performed on PEREGRINE (NREL), XSEDE (NSF ACI-1053575), and NERSC (DOE DE-AC02-05CH11231). J.B. thanks the support by the Robert A. Welch Foundation (E-1728). H.Z. acknowledge the supports from Hundred Youth Talents Program of Hunan Province and the 'XiaoXiang Scholar' Talents Foundation of Hunan Normal University. Author Contributions: Z.R. led the project. F.Y. and H.Z. designed and performed the majority of the experiments and obtained most of the results including material synthesis, characterization, and electrochemical tests. Y.H. and W.A.G. carried out the DFT calculations. J.S. took the TEM images and analyzed the data. F.Q. and J.B. helped to test the gas chromatography. S.C. devoted to the electrochemical data analysis. F.Y., H.Z., S.C., W.A.G., and Z.R. wrote the paper. All the authors have discussed the results and wrote the paper together. The authors declare no competing interests. Data availability: The data that support the findings of this work are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Additional details

Identifiers

PMCID
PMC6026163
Eprint ID
87543
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20180705-074225050

Funding

Department of Energy (DOE)
DE-SC0010831
University of Houston
NSF
CBET-1512759
NSF
ACI-1053575
Department of Energy (DOE)
DE-AC02-05CH11231
Robert A. Welch Foundation
E-1728
Hunan Normal University

Dates

Created
2018-07-05
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2022-03-09
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Other Numbering System Name
WAG
Other Numbering System Identifier
1287