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Facile fabrication of amorphous NiFeP nanosheets to promote urea oxidation reaction for energy-saving hydrogen production

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Abstract

Although Urea oxidation reaction (UOR) with favorable thermodynamic potential has been well-acknowledged as a feasible alternative to slow oxygen evolution reaction for hydrogen production through water splitting, but the shortage of low-cost and high efficiency electrocatalysts restricts its practical development. In this research, a free-standing nickel–iron-phosphide (NiFeP) nanosheets electrocatalysts on nickel foam is synthesized by electrodeposition method. The presence of phosphide (P) causes nickel–iron (NiFe) to evolve from crystalline to amorphous structures. The NiFeP electrocatalysts with nanosheets structure exhibit reliable electrocatalytic activities toward UOR with small potential of 1.397 V at 10 mA cm−2, low Tafel slope of 60.1 mV dec−1 and outstanding catalytic stability in 1.0 M KOH with 0.33 M urea solution. More impressively, the electrochemical activation energy (Ea) of UOR for the NiFeP electrocatalyst (35.6 kJ mol−1) is much lower than that of NiFe electrocatalyst (52.1 kJ mol−1). The phosphorus do** triggers the electronic structure of Ni and Fe site reconstruction, which is conducive to accelerating charge and mass transport, and then contributes to the enhanced electrocatalytic performance. Furthermore, the formation of amorphous structure and nanosheets structure by the incorporation of phosphorus contributes to the improved intrinsic activity of NiFeP for UOR.

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The data that support all plots within this paper are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Prof & Head, School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, **nxiang University for supporting us by providing lab and technical facilities.

Funding

This work was financially supported by Open Fund of Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Functional Materials and Applications (fma2020008), Jiangsu Provincial Double Innovation Program (JSSCBS20211000), the Department Education of Jiangsu Province (No. 23KJB430013), and Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (2021A1515110092).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, **nxiang University, **nxiang, 453003, China

    Junhui Cao, Guanglong Wang, Shusen Hou, Weixin Yu & Zhijun Yang

  2. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, Zhenjiang, 212003, China

    Yihui Wu

  3. Foshan (Southern China) Institute for New Materials, Foshan, 528247, China

    Yihui Wu

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  1. Junhui Cao
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  2. Guanglong Wang
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  4. Weixin Yu
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Contributions

JC: Investigation, writing—original draft preparation, data curation. GW: Investigation, visualization, writing—reviewing and editing. SH: Conceptualization, methodology, project administration, funding acquisition. WY: Analysing and reviewing the results. ZY: Writing—reviewing and editing. YW: Writing—reviewing, editing and funding acquisition.

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Correspondence to Shusen Hou or Yihui Wu.

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Cao, J., Wang, G., Hou, S. et al. Facile fabrication of amorphous NiFeP nanosheets to promote urea oxidation reaction for energy-saving hydrogen production. J Mater Sci 58, 16019–16032 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-023-09048-4

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