Epitaxial heterointerfacial electron bridge synchronizes oxygen evolution activity and stability on a layered double hydroxide surface†

Abstract

Scalable green hydrogen production via electrocatalytic water splitting is largely restricted by the insufficient activity and stability of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts at the anode. As a class of the most active OER catalysts in alkaline electrolyzers, the application of layered double hydroxides (LDHs) remains a main challenge owing to the unstable lattice oxygen dissolution due to the dominant lattice oxygen-involving OER mechanism during long-term operation. Herein, we found that using an epitaxial hetero-interfacing nickel hydroxide (namely Ni(OH)₂) as an electron bridge between an active FeCo LDH and Ni foam support to form an LDH*/NFO catalyst, the electronic storage capacity around the Fermi level (−0.5 to +0.5 eV, e-D_FE) sharply increases from 0.93 per cell to 1.51 per cell. Subsequently, we demonstrate that this high e-D_FE enables ceaseless and fast power injection into the kinetic process of intermediate species conversion and inhibits lattice oxygen dissolution in the active FeCo LDH. Consequently, it demonstrated a low OER overpotential of 246 mV at a current density of 100 mA cm⁻² and ultrahigh stability for up to 3500 hours with an ultraslow overpotential increase rate of 9.4 × 10⁻³ mV h⁻¹. Therefore, we developed an epitaxial hetero-interfacial electron bridging strategy to synchronize the activity and stability of available catalysts for scalable green hydrogen production via electrocatalytic water splitting.