Activating cobalt(II) oxide nanorods for efficient electrocatalysis by strain engineering
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Date
2017
Authors
Ling, T.
Yan, D.-Y.
Wang, H.
Jiao, Y.
Hu, Z.
Zheng, Y.
Zheng, L.
Mao, J.
Liu, H.
Du, X.-W.
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Journal article
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Nature Communications, 2017; 8(1):1-7
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Tao Ling, Dong-Yang Yan, Hui Wang, Yan Jiao, Zhenpeng Hu, Yao Zheng, Lirong Zheng, Jing Mao, Hui Liu, Xi-Wen Du, Mietek Jaroniec, Shi-Zhang Qiao
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Abstract
Designing high-performance and cost-effective electrocatalysts toward oxygen evolution and hydrogen evolution reactions in water-alkali electrolyzers is pivotal for large-scale and sustainable hydrogen production. Earth-abundant transition metal oxide-based catalysts are particularly active for oxygen evolution reaction; however, they are generally considered inactive toward hydrogen evolution reaction. Here, we show that strain engineering of the outermost surface of cobalt(II) oxide nanorods can turn them into efficient electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction. They are competitive with the best electrocatalysts for this reaction in alkaline media so far. Our theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that the tensile strain strongly couples the atomic, electronic structure properties and the activity of the cobalt(II) oxide surface, which results in the creation of a large quantity of oxygen vacancies that facilitate water dissociation, and fine tunes the electronic structure to weaken hydrogen adsorption toward the optimum region.
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© The Author(s) 2017 Open Access 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/.