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Efficient oxygen evolution on spinel MFe2O4 (M = Zn and Ni) electrocatalysts

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Abstract

Electrochemical water splitting for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) requires highly active, long-durable, and cost-effective catalysts to meet the needs of large-scale hydrogen production in the future. Herein, we studied the OER performance of spinel MFe2O4 (M = Zn and Ni) and NiOx. These metal oxides showed markedly different activities, which were closely related to their charge-transfer resistance and electrochemical surface area, attributing to the amount of oxygen vacancies. Particularly, ZnFe2O4 exhibits superior OER activity with an overpotential of 318 mV at the current density of 10 mA cm−2 (η10) and a Tafel slope of 50 mV dec−1. Furthermore, ZnFe2O4 also presents outstanding long-term stability for 100 h with negligible decay even at a high current density of 800 mA cm−2. This work provides a fundamental insight into the oxygen vacancy and spinel structure to help for the design of OER catalyst toward highly efficient water splitting.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Funding

This work was supported by the China Energy Group Science and Technology Innovation Foundation (ST930022019N).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. New Energy Technology Development Center, National Institute of Clean-and-Low-Carbon Energy, P.O. Box 102211, Beijing, China

    Yanying Liu, Tianyin Deng, Guangli He, Zhihua Han, Jingyun Chen, Hui Wei & Ping Miao

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  1. Yanying Liu
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  2. Tianyin Deng
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  3. Guangli He
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Contributions

YY Liu: conceptualization, data curation, methodology, and writing—original draft. TY Deng: methodology, data curation, and formal analysis. GL He: methodology and formal analysis. Zhihua Han: methodology. Jingyun Chen: validation. Hui Wei: validation. Ping Miao: conceptualization, writing—review and editing, and project administration. All authors have read and approved the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Ping Miao.

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Liu, Y., Deng, T., He, G. et al. Efficient oxygen evolution on spinel MFe2O4 (M = Zn and Ni) electrocatalysts. Ionics 29, 3203–3211 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11581-023-05022-x

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