Precious metal-free CoFe layered double hydroxide as an efficient catalyst for oxygen evolution reaction

The preparation of high-efficiency, stable and low-cost electrocatalysts for Oxygen Evolution Reaction (OER) is essential for generating clean hydrogen energy. Most of the reported electrocatalysts have complex preparation methods with low yields, and some even add precious metals. Here, a simple one-step co-precipitation method is presented to synthesize CoFe-LDH (layered double hydroxide) nanosheets with a layered defect structure. The specific structure synthesized by a facile method can promote the diffusion of proton acceptors in interlayer basal plan. Meanwhile, Co 3 Fe 1 -LDH shows remarkable electrocatalytic activity, the corresponding overpotential at 10 mA·cm −2 is 314 mV, and the Tafel slope is only 79.4 mV·dec -1 , which owns superior performance than that of most reported LDH electrocatalytic for OER. In addition, our research illustrates that simple CoFe-LDH also can show excellent electrocatalytic performance by adjusting the charge density of the main layer.