Earth‐Abundant Iron Diboride (FeB2) Nanoparticles as Highly Active Bifunctional Electrocatalysts for Overall Water Splitting
By Hui Li, Pengchao Wen, Qi Li, Chaochao Dun, Junheng Xing, Chang Lu, S. Adhikari, Lin Jiang, David L. Carroll, S. Geyer. 2017
325 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Developing efficient, durable, and earth‐abundant electrocatalysts for both hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions is important for realizing large‐scale water splitting. The authors report that FeB2 nanoparticles, prepared by a facile chemical reduction of Fe2+ using LiBH4 in an organic solvent, are a superb bifunctional electrocatalyst for overall water splitting. The FeB2 electrode delivers a current density of 10 mA cm−2 at overpotentials of 61 mV for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and 296 mV for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in alkaline electrolyte with Tafel slopes of 87.5 and 52.4 mV dec−1, respectively. The electrode can sustain the HER at an overpotential of 100 mV for 24 h and OER for 1000 cyclic voltammetry cycles with negligible degradation. Density function theory calculations demonstrate that the boron‐rich surface possesses appropriate binding energy for chemisorption and desorption of hydrogen‐containing intermediates, thus favoring the HER process. The excellent OER activity of FeB2 is ascribed to the formation of a FeOOH/FeB2 heterojunction during water oxidation. An alkaline electrolyzer is constructed using two identical FeB2‐NF electrodes as both anode and cathode, which can achieve a current density of 10 mA cm−2 at 1.57 V for overall water splitting with a faradaic efficiency of nearly 100%, rivalling the integrated state‐of‐the‐art Pt/C and RuO2/C.
Subfields: Catalysis, Organic Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/296208cd9be0d119c621370a37db1b06d8ea8fd8
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In Organic Chemistry
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- Boride-based electrocatalysts: Emerging candidates for water splitting (2020, methodology): “compared the catalytic performance of FeB2 and Fe2B for water splitting [106].”