Currently,
the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) plays a key role
in the industrial application of renewable electrochemical technologies.
Thus, developing electrocatalysts with high performance and sufficient
stability for the OER is urgently pursued. Although perovskite oxides
have provided numerous degrees of freedom for enhancing the electrocatalytic
activity due to their diversity and flexibility, their investigation
for the OER is mostly limited to pseudocubic structures. In this study,
a complex perovskite oxide, Ba0.9Sr0.1Co0.8Fe0.1Ir0.1O3−δ (BSCFI-91), with a six-layer hexagonal (6H) structure, is synthesized
first, displaying higher OER activity. Based on parent Ba0.9Sr0.1Co0.8Fe0.2O3−δ (BSCF-91), BSCFI-91 is obtained by replacing iron (Fe) with low-level
iridium (Ir) doping and produces a current density of 10 mA cm–2 at a low overpotential of 300 mV, a small Tafel slope
of 61.2 mV dec–1, and good stability up to 10 h
in a 1.0 M KOH electrolyte. The dramatically enhanced OER performance
is achieved by optimizing cobalt (Co) valence and highly oxidative
oxygen species based on the hexagonal structure. The Ir incorporation
facilitated the oxygen (O) p band center approaching to the Fermi
level, indicating that BSCFI-91 could be a candidate in the electrocatalyst
application. Moreover, this study opens up a new way to design efficient
perovskite oxides for OER catalysis in terms of hexagonal crystal
structures and composition modulation strategy.