Construction of Ordered Atomic Donor–Acceptor Architectures in bcc IrGa Intermetallic Compounds toward Highly Electroactive and Stable Overall Water Splitting
Huaifang Zhang, Peidong Shi, Xiao Ma, Chaoqun Ma, Sumei Han, Caihong He, Haoming Wu, Lijie Zhu, Bowei Zhang, Yunzhang Lu, Wenbin Cao, Haiqing Yin, Xiangmin Meng, Jing Xia, Jiangwei Zhang, An‐Liang Wang, Qipeng Lu
Abstract
Abstract Benefiting from ordered atomic structures and strong d‐orbital interactions, intermetallic compounds (IMCs) are promising electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Herein, the body‐centered cubic IrGa IMCs with atomic donor–acceptor architectures are synthesized and anchored on the nitrogen‐doped reduced graphene oxide (i.e., IrGa/N‐rGO). Structural characterizations and theoretical calculations reveal that the electron‐rich Ir sites are atomically dispersed in IrGa/N‐rGO, facilitating the electron transfer between Ir atoms and adsorbed species, which can efficiently decrease the energy barriers of the potential determining step for both HER and OER. Impressively, the IrGa/N‐rGO||IrGa/N‐rGO exhibits excellent performance for overall water splitting in alkaline medium, requiring a low cell voltage of 1.51 V to achieve 10 mA cm −2 , meanwhile, exhibiting no significant degradation for 100 h. This work demonstrates that the rational design of noble metal electrocatalysts with donor–acceptor architectures is beneficial for catalytic reactions in energy conversion applications.