Design and Synthesis of Highly Performing Bifunctional Ni-NiO-MoNi Hybrid Catalysts for Enhanced Urea Oxidation and Hydrogen Evolution Reactions
Qinglian Xu, Guangfu Qian, Shibin Yin, Yu Chen, Wei Chen, Tianqi Yu, Lin Luo, Yijiang Xia, Panagiotis Tsiakaras
Abstract
In order to provide solutions for the pollution caused by nitrogen-containing wastewater and the shortage of fossil fuels, it is urgent to design highly performing bifunctional catalysts for the urea oxidation reaction (UOR) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Herein, asok-like Ni-NiO-Mo0.84Ni0.16/NF hybrids are synthesized via hydrothermal and calcination methods. They exhibit superior catalytic activities for UOR (1.33 V at 50 mA cm–2), higher than the ever-reported NiMo-based catalysts, and for HER (0.069 V at 50 mA cm–2). Furthermore, the decline in catalytic performance is negligible after operating for 60 h at 250 mA cm–2. We suppose that the reason could be attributed to the special asok-like structure, a self-supported structure formed with 3D nickel foam (NF) and the three-phase hybrids. This work proposes a new strategy for the preparation of asok-like NiMo-based cost-effective catalysts, highly performing for both nitrogen-containing wastewater treatment and large-scale H2 production.