Iron-doped NiCoO2 nanoplates as efficient electrocatalysts for oxygen evolution reaction

Electrocatalysts play a vital role to overcome the slow kinetics of the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Herein, we developed iron-doped (Fe-doped) NiCoO2 nanoplates with NaCl-type structure as an efficient electrocatalyst to speed up OER. NiCoO2 nanoplates doping with different concentration of Fe were optimized. Specifically, the catalytic properties of 10 mol% Fe-doped NiCoO2 (denoted as FNC0.1) showed outstanding OER catalytic activity, with an overpotential of 302 mV and a low Tafel slope of 42 mV dec−1 at 10 mA cm−2 in 0.1 M KOH. More importantly, the activity of FNC0.1 was only about 3% loss after 10 h of stability measurements at 1.53 V vs. RHE. The dramatically enhanced OER performance of the FNC0.1 might derive from the synergistic interplay of Co, Ni and Fe, a certain level of amorphization and easily hydroxylation after doping Fe. This work demonstrated that doping Fe would be beneficial to improve the OER activities and the stabilities of the catalysts.