Atomic iridium@cobalt nanosheets for dinuclear tandem water oxidation. Issue 14 (19th March 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Babu, Dickson D.; Huang, Yiyin; Anandhababu, Ganesan; Wang, Xu; Si, Rui; Wu, Maoxiang; Li, Qiaohong; Wang, Yaobing; Yao, Jiannian
• Is Part Of: Journal of materials chemistry. Volume 7:Issue 14(2019)
• Page Start: 8376
• Page End: 8383
• Publication Date: 2019-03-19
• Subjects: Materials -- Research -- Periodicals; Chemistry, Analytic -- Periodicals; Environmental sciences -- Research -- Periodicals; 543.0284
• DOI: 10.1039/c9ta01088b
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2050-7488

Abstract

Abstract : Atomic Ir@Co nanosheets were synthesized by an atomically confined alloying strategy for effectively catalyzing the OER via a new dinuclear cooperative mechanism. Abstract : Atomization of noble metals enable their electrocatalysis applications with low cost, whereas the isolated mononuclear site after atomization might lead leads to limited performance. Herein, we present a general strategy of atomically confined alloying (ACA) to synthesize an electrocatalyst of single atom iridium-trapping cobalt nanosheets with dual-reactive Ir–Co sites. The atomic Ir@Co nanosheets (1.7 wt% Ir) exhibit excellent oxygen evolution reaction (OER) performance with a small overpotential (273 mV at 10 mA cm −2 ) and high stability, higher than that of the Ir/C catalyst (290 mV at 10 mA cm −2 ). More importantly, density functional theory (DFT) calculations combined with experiments demonstrated that water oxidation proceeded on atomic Ir@Co nanosheets via a dinuclear tandem mechanism, in which Ir–Co dual sites cooperatively worked in favour of the sequential transfer from Co–OH* to Ir–O* via a Co–O–Ir intermediate, and stabilization of OOH* species by hydrogen bonding interaction. The cooperative mechanism based on a dinuclear electrocatalyst by ACA is hoped to open up more possibilities of single atom noble metal electrocatalysts for various applications.