ReviewNiFe-based nanostructures on nickel foam as highly efficiently electrocatalysts for oxygen and hydrogen evolution reactions
Graphical abstract
This review outlines the progress on the combination of NiFe-based materials and nickel foam, and the synthetic methods, structural changes and electrochemical performances (OER and HER) of these materials are well discussed.
Introduction
The accelerating depletion of fossil fuels and the ever-growing issue of environment have attracted widespread concerns. The development of new energy resource has become an urgent challenge [1], [2], [3]. In this regard, as a highly efficient and clean technology, electrochemical water splitting (WS) is easily coupled to other renewable energy resource, such as wind power, wave power and solar energy, and stands out in various hydrogen production technologies. It is well known that WS is composed of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) processes [4], [5], [6]. However, the practical applications of WS are restrained due to the high overpotentials of anodic OER and cathodic HER [7], [8]. Thus, it is necessary to develop an efficient catalyst to reduce the overpotentials of WS. Currently, Ru/Ir- and Pt-based materials are the most efficient catalysts for OER and HER, respectively [9], [10]. However, these high cost and scarce catalysts impede the widespread application of WS. Moreover, due to the inharmonious of optimum electrolyte pH, most of catalysts become difficult to trigger WS efficiently when they are in an integrated electrolyze [11]. Besides, the stability of catalysts is another important factor for application. Therefore, it is an urgent demand to design a catalyst with high activity, low cost and long-term stability to replace noble metal-based catalysts.
Recently, transition metals (such as Mn [12], [13], [14], Ni [15], [16], [17], Co [18], [19], [20] and Fe [21], [22]) based catalysts have been widely investigated for WS. Moreover, the combination of the two metals will tend to bring higher electrochemical performance towards OER and HER [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28]. Significantly, compared with other electrocatalysts (NiCo-based, NiMn-based, CoFe-based, etc.), NiFe-based catalysts show superior performance in both OER and HER. More interestingly, Ni and Fe are always found together in the earth and trace Fe in Ni(OH)2 electrodes can significantly improve OER performance of Ni(OH)2. According to the previous reports, NiFeOxHy is regarded as the best OER catalyst. Besides, the excellent HER performance of NiFe-based catalysts has also been proved in many researches [29], [30]. The reserves of Ni and Fe in earth are abundant, which can reduce the cost of commercialization. At present, there are two main methods for preparing WS catalyst electrodes [31]. The commonly used one is to drop a slurry composed of catalyst and conductive binder onto the electrodes [32], [33], [34]. However, such method has two drawbacks: (i) the electrical insulating binder used to make up slurry will decrease the contact area of catalyst and electrolytes, which will reduce the electrocatalytic performance [35]; (ii) the attached catalysts are liable to shed out from the electrode under high current density due to the large producing rate of H2/O2 bubbles, which causes a poor stability. In order to overcome the above bottlenecks, people combined the WS catalysts and conductive substrates as the another WS catalysts preparation method, such as carbon paper [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], copper foils [42], [43], [44], [45], FTO [46], [47], [48], [49], nickel foils [50], [51], [52], [53], iron substrates [54], stainless-steel [51], [55] and nickel foam [56], [57], [58]. As a 3D porous substrate, nickel foam has the advantages of good electrical conductivity (accelerate the diffusion of electrons), high specific surface area (conductive to the dispersion of the catalysts) and the porous structure (diffuse the generated gas in timely) [59], [60]. Therefore, the application of nickel foam in WS has attached great attention, especially at high current density. At present, more and more catalysts on nickel foam have been reported, which can withstand a long period of time at high current density. Thus, they attract much more attention for practical applications. Generally, the assembling of catalysts and nickel foam mainly includes hydrothermal reaction and electrodeposition. The hydrothermal reaction can obtain the catalysts with high purity, good crystallinity and regular morphology, but it is time consuming. The electrodeposition has the advantage of timesaving, but this approach has a complex operation with high cost in practical applications. We summarized the methods of NiFe-based electrocatalysts on nickel foam in Table 1.
There are several meaningful reviews about the NiFe-based electrocatalysts and the electrocatalysts on nickel foam [61]. However, no systematic review about the combination of them for OER and HER has been reported yet. Therefore, in this review, we summarize the reports of NiFe-based catalysts on nickel foam in OER and HER, respectively. This review will provide a more comprehensive understanding of NiFe-based electrocatalysts on nickel foam and provide some references for the design of such electrocatalysts in the future.
Section snippets
Electrochemical parameters for oxygen and hydrogen evolution reactions
Since the first report on WS with a cathode and an anode in an electrolyte in 1789, enormous efforts have been made to develop high-performance WS catalysts. Earlier comparisons of catalytic performance focused on the current density at a certain overpotential. With the deepening of research, there are several main parameters to evaluate the catalytic performance such as, overpotential (Fig. 1(a) and (b)), Tafel slope (Fig. 1(c)), electrochemical impedance spectrum (EIS) (Fig. 1(d)),
NiFe-based electrocatalysts on nickel foam for OER
Since the OER undergoes four electrons pathway, the OER requires more energy input than HER (two electrons pathway) [70]. Thus, most of the OER catalysts tend to exhibit higher overpotentials, and the OER plays an essential role in WS [44], [71]. The sluggish OER can significantly hinder the efficiency of the overall reactions and thus impede the practical application. Therefore, developing stable and efficient OER catalysts with low overpotential is still profoundly desired.
At the early stage,
NiFe-based electrocatalysts on nickel foam for HER
HER has received a lot of attention recently as another important half reaction in WS. It plays an important role in contemporary clean-energy revolution, such as proton exchange membrane (PEM) [128], [129], [130], chlor-alkali electrolyzers [131], water-alkali electrolyzers [132] and solar water-splitting devices [2], [133]. However, the large overpotential and the high requirement of non-noble metal catalyst in the electrolyte restricted its practical applications. It is difficult to develop
Perspectives and future directions
This review highlights the recent research in the development of NiFe-based materials on nickel foam for OER and HER. Nickel foam not only can serve as an ideal catalyst substrate due to its good conductivity and porosity, but also can participate in the reaction as the reactant. Meanwhile, nickel foam can keep the stability under 0.5 M H2SO4 for a long time during the appropriate voltage range, which relatively expands its application range. As outlined in our review, numerous works reported
Acknowledgments
This work is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51473081 and 51672143), Taishan Scholars Program, Outstanding Youth of Natural Science in Shandong Province (JQ201713), Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2017MEM018) and ARC Discovery Project (No. 170103317).
Wei Zhang is currently a master student in materials science at Qingdao University. His research interest focus on the study of electrocatalysis, especially for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER).
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2024, Green Energy and EnvironmentCitation Excerpt :Researchers have paid tremendous efforts to develop earth-abundant catalytic materials in alkaline conditions. NiFe-based materials are studied due to their relatively high-performance [6–9]. Wang et al. [10–12] prepared a series of NiFe-based catalysts on nickel foam with novel nanoflower-like structure and heteroatom doping for enhancing OER performance.
Wei Zhang is currently a master student in materials science at Qingdao University. His research interest focus on the study of electrocatalysis, especially for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER).
Daohao Li received his doctoral degree from Qingdao University in 2018. His current research mainly focuses on the design and development of functional nano-materials for energy storage applications, especially for supercapacitors and lithium/sodium ion batteries.
Longzhou Zhang got the B.E. degree from Xi'an Jiaotong University (China) in 2012 and then received his Ph.D. degree in inorganic chemistry from Griffith University (Australia) in 2018. In the November of 2018, he joined Yunnan University as a research fellow. His research focuses on the nanomaterials for electrocatalytic reactions, especially on the defective carbons and atomic metal catalysts.
Prof. Xilin She received his M.S. degree from Qingdao University in 2002, and received his Ph.D. from Beijing University of Chemical Technology in 2005. His research interest include the fabrication of versatile functional nanomaterials and electrodes for energy storage and conversion devices.
Prof. Dongjiang Yang received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006. Then he went to the Queensland University of Technology and Griffith University to work as a postdoctoral fellow. He is now working as a research fellow at Queensland Micro- and Nanotechnology Centre (QMNC) of Griffith University (Australia). He joined Qingdao University as a professor in 2012. His research interests mainly focus on functional materials for energy storage & conversion with fuel cells and batteries, such as zinc-air/lithium/sodium-ion batteries.