Rational regulation of electrochemical reconfiguration and exploration of activity origin are important foundations for realizing the optimization of electrocatalyst activity, but rather challenging. Herein, we potentially develop a rapid complete reconfiguration strategy for the heterostructures of CoC2O4 coated by MXene nanosheets (CoC2O4@MXene) during the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) process. The self-assembled CoC2O4@MXene nanotubular structure has high electronic accessibility and abundant electrolyte diffusion channels, which favor the rapid complete reconfiguration. Such rapid reconfiguration creates new actual catalytic active species of Co(OH)2 transformed from CoC2O4, which is coupled with MXene to facilitate charge transfer and decrease the free energy of the Volmer step toward fast HER kinetics. The reconfigured components require low overpotentials of 28 and 216 mV at 10 and 1000 mA cm−2 in alkaline conditions and decent activity and stability in natural seawater. This work gives new insights for understanding the actual active species formation during HER and opens up a new way toward high-performance electrocatalysts.
Ecological security patterns composed of ecological sources and corridors provide an effective approach to conserving natural ecosystems. Although the direction of ecological corridors have been identified in previous studies, the precise range remains unknown. To address this crucial gap, ant colony algorithm and kernel density estimation were applied to identify the range and restoration points of ecological corridors, which is important for natural conservation and ecological restoration. In this case study of Beijing City, ecological sources were identified based on habitat importance and landscape connectivity. The results showed that, in total 3119.65 km 2 of ecological land had been extracted as ecological sources, which were mainly located in the northern, northwestern and northeastern mountainous areas. The identified key ecological corridor covered an area of 198.86 km 2 , with 567.30 km 2 for potential ecological corridors, both connecting the ecological sources. 34 key points were also identified with priority in restoring ecological corridors.
The scalable production of inexpensive, efficient, and
robust catalysts
for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) that can deliver high current
densities at low potentials is critical for the industrial implementation
of water splitting technology. Herein, a series of metal oxides coupled
with Fe2O3 are in situ grown on iron foam massively
via an ultrafast combustion approach for a few seconds. Benefiting
from the three-dimensional nanosheet array framework and the heterojunction
structure, the self-supporting electrodes with abundant active centers
can regulate mass transport and electronic structure for prompting
OER activity at high current density. The optimized Ni(OH)2/Fe2O3 with robust structure can deliver a
high current density of 1000 mA cm–2 at the overpotential
as low as 271 mV in 1.0 M KOH for up to 1500 h. Theoretical calculation
demonstrates that the strong electronic modulation plays a crucial
part in the hybrid by optimizing the adsorption energy of the intermediate,
thereby enhancing the efficiency of oxygen evolution. This work proposes
a method to construct cheap and robust catalysts for practical application
in energy conversion and storage.
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