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Unconventional dual-vacancies in nickel diselenide-graphene nanocomposite for high-efficiency oxygen evolution catalysis

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Abstract

Although nickel-based catalysts display good catalytic capability and excellent corrosion resistance under alkaline electrolytes for water splitting, it is still imperative to enhance their activity for real device applications. Herein, we decorated Ni0.85Se hollow nanospheres onto reduced graphene oxide (RGO) through a hydrothermal route, then annealed this composite at different temperatures (400 °C, NiSe2-400 and 450 °C, NiSe2-450) under argon atmosphere, yielding a kind of NiSe2/RGO composite catalysts. Positron annihilation spectra revealed two types of vacancies formed in this composite catalyst. We found that the NiSe2-400 catalyst with dual Ni-Se vacancies is able to catalyze the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) efficiently, needing a mere 241 mV overpotential at 10 mA·cm−2. In addition, this catalyst exhibits outstanding stability. Computational studies show favorable energy barrier on NiSe2-400, enabling moderate OH− adsorption and O2 desorption, which leads to the enhanced energetics for OER.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge financial support from the Tianjin science and technology support key projects (No. 18YFZCSF00500), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21521001, 21431006, 21225315, 21321002, 91645202, 51702312, and 21975237), the Users with Excellence and Scientific Research Grant of Hefei Science Center of CAS (No. 2015HSCUE007), the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS (No. QYZDJ-SSW-SLH036), the National Basic Research Program of China (Nos. 2014CB931800 and 2018YFA0702001), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Nos. KGZD-EW-T05 and XDA090301001), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. XDA21000000), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. WK2340000076), and the Recruitment Program of Global Youth Experts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tianjin Key Laboratory of Environmental Remediation and Pollution Control, College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300350, China

    Pengkun Wei, Zewei Hao, Yang Yang & Mingyang Liu

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Rice University, Houston, Texas, 77005, USA

    Mingyang Liu

  3. Center for Aircraft Fire and Emergency, Economics and Management College, Civil Aviation University of China, Tianjin, 300300, China

    Haijun Zhang

  4. Division of Nanomaterials & Chemistry, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, Hefei Science Center of CAS, Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Min-Rui Gao & Shu-Hong Yu

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  1. Pengkun Wei
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Correspondence to Mingyang Liu, Haijun Zhang, Min-Rui Gao or Shu-Hong Yu.

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Unconventional dual-vacancies in nickel diselenide-graphene nanocomposite for high-efficiency oxygen evolution catalysis

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Wei, P., Hao, Z., Yang, Y. et al. Unconventional dual-vacancies in nickel diselenide-graphene nanocomposite for high-efficiency oxygen evolution catalysis. Nano Res. 13, 3292–3298 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-3005-4

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