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One-step dealloying of Ni-Y-Al metallic glass for fabrication of nanoporous hybrid toward efficient water splitting reaction

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Abstract

The development of high-performance, cost-effectiveness bifunctional catalysts synthesized by convenient strategy has aroused great attention toward water splitting reaction. In this work, the nanoporous catalyst with a sandwich structure, constructed of amorphous alloy matrix and porous layers, was fabricated by one-step dealloying of Ni25Y60Al15 metallic glass for 15 min in citric acid solution. This catalyst, consisting of the hybrid of NiY and NiO, exhibited a uniform three-dimension porous structure with a pore size of about 5–20 nm. The electrochemical measurements indicated that the nanoporous hybrid possesses excellent catalytic performances toward hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in alkaline medium. The overpotentials at 50 mA/cm2 are about 0.45 V and 0.52 V for HER and OER, respectively, with low Tafel slopes of 43.9 mV/dec and 116.8 mV/dec. The enhanced electro-catalysis mainly contributed to its large electrochemically active surface area and low interfacial charge transfer resistance. As such, this high-performance, low-cost, and bifunctional nanoporous catalyst has broad application prospects in electrocatalytic water splitting.

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Acknowledgements

The authors greatly acknowledge the financial support from the State Key Lab of Advanced Metals and Materials (Grant No. 2019-Z04), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. U20A20279, 11804260, 11704292), and Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Systems Science in Metallurgical Process (Grant No. Y201903). We would like to thank Mr. Zhang at the Analytical & Testing Center of Wuhan University of Science and Technology for the help on XPS analysis.

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  1. The State Key Laboratory for Refractories and Metallurgy, Collaborative Innovation Center for Advanced Steels, International Research Institute for Steel Technology, Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Systems Science in Metallurgical Process, College of Science, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430081, China

    Fudong Li, Shushen Wang, Lingyu Gu, Xiu Chang, Hengfu Lin & Kaiming Wu

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  1. Fudong Li
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Li, F., Wang, S., Gu, L. et al. One-step dealloying of Ni-Y-Al metallic glass for fabrication of nanoporous hybrid toward efficient water splitting reaction. Ionics 28, 1367–1376 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11581-021-04434-x

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