Application of Oxygen‐Group‐Based Amorphous Nanomaterials in Electrocatalytic Water Splitting

Abstract

Environmentally friendly energy sources (e.g., hydrogen) require an urgent development targeting to address the problem of energy scarcity. Electrocatalytic water splitting is being explored as a convenient catalytic reaction in this context, and promising amorphous nanomaterials (ANMs) are receiving increasing attention due to their excellent catalytic properties.Oxygen group‐based amorphous nanomaterials (O‐ANMs) are an important component of the broad family of ANMs due to their unique amorphous structure, large number of defects, and abundant randomly oriented bonds, O‐ANMs induce the generation of a larger number of active sites, which favors a better catalytic activity. Meanwhile, amorphous materials can disrupt the inherent features of conventional crystalline materials regarding electron transfer paths, resulting in higher flexibility. O‐ANMs mainly include VIA elements such as oxygen, sulfur, selenium, tellurium, and other transition metals, most of which are reported to be free of noble metals and have comparable performance to commercial catalysts Pt/C or IrO2 and RuO2 in electrocatalysis. This review covers the features and reaction mechanism of O‐ANMs, the synthesis strategies to prepare O‐ANMs, as well as the application of O‐ANMs in electrocatalytic water splitting. Last, the challenges and prospective remarks for future development in O‐ANMs for electrocatalytic water splitting are concluded.

Construction of NiCo-metaphosphate/hydroxide with synergistic heterostructure for sustainable biomass electro-oxidation

“…In comparison, it has been found that TMPi and TMPii show higher stabilities under electro-oxidation conditions. 27–30 Previous studies proposed that the flexible coordination of metaphosphate/phosphate ligands in TMPi/TMPii can stabilize the intermediate state of the transition metal by changing their local position with ease, hence facilitating water oxidation ( i.e. , OER).…”