Improving the water oxidation performance of abundantly available materials, such as stainless steel (SS), with notable intrinsic electrocatalytic oxygen evolution reaction (OER) activity due to the presence of Ni and Fe is highly anticipated in water splitting. A new method for promoting the corrosion of stainless steel (304) was found which assisted the uniform formation of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) enhancing NiO incorporated Fe₂O₃ nanocrystals with the simultaneous reduction in the surface distribution of OER inactive Cr. An equimolar combination of KOH and hypochlorite was used as the corroding agent at 180 °C. The effect of corrosion time on the OER activity was studied and found that better water oxidation performance was observed when the corrosion time was 12 h (SS-12). The SS-12 showed an abnormal enhancement in OER activity compared to the untreated SS and other optimized versions of the same by requiring very low overpotentials of 260, 302, and 340 mV at the current densities of 10, 100, and 500 mA cm^–2 along with a very low Tafel slope in the range of 35.6 to 43.5 mV dec^–1. These numbers have certainly shown the high-performance electrocatalytic water oxidizing ability of SS-12. The comparative study revealed that the state-of-the-art IrO₂ had failed to compete with our performance improved catalytic water oxidation anode “the SS-12”. This fruitful finding indicates that the SS-12 has the potential to be an alternate anode material to precious IrO₂/RuO₂ for alkaline water electrolyzers in future.

中文翻译：

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通过控制表面氧化和Cr去除从不锈钢中获得高性能的析氧阳极

由于水和镍的存在，人们非常期待通过镍和铁的存在来改善具有不锈钢的显着内在电催化氧析出反应（OER）活性的大量可用材料，例如不锈钢（SS）的水氧化性能。发现了一种促进不锈钢腐蚀的新方法（304），该方法有助于均匀地形成析氧反应（OER），从而增强掺入Fe ₂ O _3的NiO同时降低OER惰性Cr的表面分布的纳米晶体。KOH和次氯酸盐的等摩尔混合物在180°C下用作腐蚀剂。研究了腐蚀时间对OER活性的影响，发现当腐蚀时间为12 h（SS-12）时，观察到更好的水氧化性能。与未经处理的SS及其它的其他优化版本相比，SS-12显示出OER活性异常增强，因为在10、100和500 mA cm的电流密度下要求极低的260、302和340 mV超电势^{– 2}以及非常低的Tafel斜率，范围为35.6至43.5 mV dec ^–1。这些数字无疑表明了SS-12的高性能电催化水氧化能力。对比研究表明，最先进的IrO ₂不能与我们性能改进的催化水氧化阳极“ SS-12”竞争。这一卓有成效的发现表明，SS-12有望在将来成为碱性电解槽的宝贵IrO ₂ / RuO ₂的替代阳极材料。