American Chemical Society
Browse

Activating Layered Double Hydroxide with Multivacancies by Memory Effect for Energy-Efficient Hydrogen Production at Neutral pH

Download (916.78 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2019-05-22, 00:00 authored by Zijian Yuan, Seong-Min Bak, Pengsong Li, Yin Jia, Lirong Zheng, Yu Zhou, Lu Bai, Enyuan Hu, Xiao-Qing Yang, Zhao Cai, Yongming Sun, Xiaoming Sun
Sustainable water-splitting hydrogen production has long been considered one of the most promising energy conversion technologies, but enormous challenges remain: for instance, water electrolysis suffers from high overpotential and over energy consumption under neutral pH conditions. Here, taking advantage of the memory effect of layered double hydroxide (LDH), we report an energy-efficient neutral water electrolyzer material based on LDH with multiple vacancy defects. Benefiting from the improved electrical conductivity, larger electrochemical surface area (ECSA), and faster charge transfer, the NiFe LDH with O, Ni, and Fe vacancies exhibits a low overpotential of 87 mV at 10 mA/cm2 for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in a pH 7 buffer electrolyte. Impressively, the as-fabricated vacancy-containing NiFe LDH (v-NiFe LDH) splits water with a current density of 10 mA/cm2 at ∼1.60 V in a two-electrode device, outperforming most other water-splitting catalysts in neutral media. Such an electrolyzer setup could be powered by a commercial 2.0 V solar cell, producing hydrogen at a current density as high as 100 mA/cm2.

History