Carbon confined Mo doped CoP for alkali overall water splitting with enhanced catalytic activity and durability

The development of efficient and low-cost overall water splitting electrocatalysts for an anion exchange membrane (AEM) electrolyzer is desirable for hydrogen production. The control of geometric and electronic structures of electrocatalysts can improve the catalytic efficiency of hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and durability in oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Spatially confined growth and heteroatom doping can achieve this prospect of the target electrocatalysts. Herein, we prepared a carbon-shell confined Mo-doped CoP electrocatalyst (Mo-CoP@C) via an anion adsorption coupled pyrolytic phosphorization method. A Metal-Organic Framework (MOF) of Co was used to achieve Mo doping and carbon-shell encapsulation. Mo doping significantly altered the electronic structure of CoP, which produced a local polarized environment for water dissociation during alkali HER process. Meanwhile, carbon-shell confined growth and provided a protective layer for durable OER process. Consequently, Mo-CoP@C exhibits attractive alkali electrocatalytic HER and OER activities with the overpotentials of 122 and 280 mV at 0.01 A cm −2 . Finally, the assembled Mo-CoP@C-CP‖Mo-CoP@C-TFF AEM electrolyzer could operate for 500 h at 0.1 A cm −2 .