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Rational design of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts at low cost would greatly benefit the economy. Taking advantage of earth-abundant elements Si, Co and Ni, we produce a unique-structure where cobalt-nickel silicate hydroxide [Co2.5Ni0.5Si2O5(OH)4] is vertically grown on a reduced graphene oxide (rGO) support (CNS@rGO). This is developed as a low-cost and prospective OER catalyst. Compared to cobalt or nickel silicate hydroxide@rGO (CS@rGO and NS@rGO, respectively) nanoarrays, the bimetal CNS@rGO nanoarray exhibits impressive OER performance with an overpotential of 307 mV@10 mA cm−2. This value is higher than that of CS@rGO and NS@rGO. The CNS@rGO nanoarray has an overpotential of 446 mV@100 mA cm−2, about 1.4 times that of the commercial RuO2 electrocatalyst. The achieved OER activity is superior to the state-of-the-art metal oxides/hydroxides and their derivatives. The vertically grown nanostructure and optimized metal-support electronic interactions play an indispensable role for OER performance improvement, including a fast electron transfer pathway, short proton/electron diffusion distance, more active metal centers, as well as optimized dual-atomic electron density. Taking advantage of interlay chemical regulation and the in-situ growth method, the advanced-structural CNS@rGO nanoarrays provide a new horizon to the rational and flexible design of efficient and promising OER electrocatalysts.
This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (DUT21LK34) and Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province (2020-MS-113).
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).