In-Situ-Engineered 3D Cu<sub>3</sub>Se<sub>2</sub>@CoSe<sub>2</sub>–NiSe<sub>2</sub> Nanostructures for Highly Efficient Electrocatalytic Water Splitting
Guoxu Wang, Jun Huang, Guangliang Chen, Wei Chen, Changsheng Song, Mengchao Li, Xingquan Wang, Dongliang Chen, Hao Zhu, Xianhui Zhang, Kostya Ostrikov
Abstract
In-situ engineering of nonprecious catalysts with highly electrocatalytic performances for H2 or O2 generation is one of unresolved challenges in industrial chemistry. In this work, a trimetallic (Cu, Ni, Co) selenide is fabricated in-situ on the nickel–cobalt foam (NCF) modified by the dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma (PNCF) with a facile hydrothermal method. The resulting transition-metal-based selenide (Cu3Se2@CoSe2–NiSe2/PNCF) exhibits excellent catalytic activity for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in 1 M KOH, and the overpotentials stimulated with a current density of 10 (j10) and 100 (j100) mA cm–2 are ∼42 and 178 mV in HER process, as well as 240 and 270 mV in OER. Specifically, the electrocatalytic activity of Cu3Se2@CoSe2–NiSe2/PNCF is better than the benchmarked RuO2 for OER in the high current density region (>j250). In addition, the amount of H2 and O2 gases for Cu3Se2@CoSe2–NiSe2/PNCF stimulated with j10 are ∼1.52 and 0.9 mmol h–1, respectively, thus exhibiting higher efficiency than numerous nonprecious catalysts containing transition metals.