Cation–Anion Dual Doping Modifying Electronic Structure of Hollow CoP Nanoboxes for Enhanced Water Oxidation Electrocatalysis
Lin Tian, Xinle Pang, Hui Xu, Dongsheng Liu, Xinhua Lü, Jing Li, Ju Wang, Zhao Li
Abstract
Tuning the electronic state of a nanocatalyst is of vital importance for elevating its catalytic performance toward oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Herein, a cation–anion dual doping strategy has been proposed for modifying the electronic structure of CoP via doping Fe and S atoms. Impressively, Fe doping has been demonstrated to be favorable for improving the carrier density of CoP to produce more hydroxyl radicals (•OH), while S doping can further modify the electronic structure of CoP to improve the charge-transfer characteristics, thereby synergistically decreasing the energy barrier for the transformation of O* to OOH* and promoting the electrocatalytic OER performance. More importantly, the highly open nanobox structure is also beneficial for the exposure of more accessible catalytically active sites, which can substantially facilitate the electron and mass transport, leading to the superb catalytic OER performance. The successful modulation of OER performance via dual-doping strategy will pose a new strategy for designing more advanced nanocatalysts for energy-related catalysis process.