Sulfur‐Vacancy Engineering Accelerates Rapid Surface Reconstruction in Ni‐Co Bimetal Sulfide Nanosheet for Urea Oxidation Electrocatalysis
Haoyuan Li, Yujuan Pu, Wenhao Li, Zitong Yan, Ruojing Deng, Fanyue Shi, Chenhao Zhao, Youkui Zhang, Tao Duan
Abstract
Abstract Developing a highly efficient catalyst for electrocatalytic urea oxidation reaction (UOR) is not only beneficial for the degradation of urea pollutants in wastewater but also provides a benign route for hydrogen production. Herein, a sulfur‐vacancy (S v ) engineering is proposed to accelerate the formation of metal (oxy)hydroxide on the surface of Ni‐Co bimetal sulfide nanosheet arrays on nickel foam (S v ‐CoNiS@NF) for boosting the urea oxidation electrocatalysis. As a result, the obtained S v ‐CoNiS@NF demonstrates an outstanding electrocatalytic UOR performance, which requires a low potential of only 1.397 V versus the reversible hydrogen electrode to achieve the current density of 100 mA cm −2 . The ex situ Raman spectra and density functional theory calculations reveal the key roles of the S v site and Co 9 S 8 in promoting the electrocatalytic UOR performance. This work provides a new strategy for accelerating the transformation of electrocatalysts to active metallic (oxy)hydroxide for urea electrolysis via engineering the surface vacancies.