Green and facile synthesis of cerium doped Ni3Fe electrocatalyst for efficient oxygen evolution reaction

Abstract

Electrochemical water splitting is the most promising pathway to produce high-purity hydrogen to alleviate global energy crisis. This reaction demands inexpensive, efficient and robust electrocatalyst for its commercial use. Herein, we demonstrate an effective, facile and scalable method for the synthesis of cerium doped Ni3Fe nanostructures as an electrocatalyst for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) by following simple chemical bath deposition route. The different molar ratios (3, 6 and 12 mM) of cerium in the chemical bath were used to study its effect on the structural and the electrochemical properties of the Ni3Fe nanostructured films. Doping of cerium contents induced variations in the morphology of deposited Ni3Fe nanostructures. The optimized electrocatalyst Ni3Fe/Ce-6 yielded high surface area catalyst nanosheets uniformly deposited on three-dimensional conductive scaffold to ensure increase in the exposure of doped Ni3Fe catalytic sites with high electrical conductivity. As a result, this earth-abundant electrocatalyst affords high OER performance with a small overpotential of 310 mV versus reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE) at 10 mA cm-2 and retains good stability up to ~ 10 h in alkaline electrolyte. This scalable strategy has great potential in future advancement of efficient and low-cost electrocatalysts for their large-scale application in energy conversion systems.
 
 KEY WORDS: Oxygen evolution, Electrocatalyst, Ni3Fe nanostructures, Cerium, Alkaline electrolyte
 
 Bull. Chem. Soc. Ethiop. 2020, 34(2), 353-363
 DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/bcse.v34i2.12

A low-content CeOx dually promoted Ni3Fe@CNT electrocatalyst for overall water splitting

“…10,11 Low-cost Ni 3 Fe-based nanostructures have emerged as one of the most potential OER electrocatalysts, due to their superior conductivity, high abundance, and Pt-like electrochemical activity. [12][13][14] Ni 3 Fe alloy nanoparticles incorporated into three-dimensional N, S co-doped carbon nanotubes/graphene nanosheets have been prepared as a bifunctional electrocatalyst, and they exhibited excellent OER performance with a low overpotential of 215 mV at 10 mA cm −2 . 15 Ni 3 Fe/wood-derived carbon (Ni 3 Fe-CW) has been prepared as a bifunctional electrocatalyst which exhibited low overpotentials of 237 and 76 mV at 10 mA cm −2 for the OER and HER, respectively.…”