Highly Dispersed Ni-Fe Active Sites on Fullerene based Electron Buffer to boost Oxygen Evolution Reaction

It is critical to develop highly efficient electrocatalysts for water splitting to achieve energy-saving hydrogen production. Recently, fullerene-based electrocatalysts have been widely reported for cathodic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), while their application for intrinsically sluggish oxygen evolution reaction (OER) at the anode has been rarely explored. Herein, a novel OER electrocatalyst, NiFe-OC60, was prepared by introducing Ni and Fe species on fullerol C60(OH)x. Fullerene-based carbon support can provide a high surface area, and be served as an electron buffer due to its inherent electron-withdrawing property. Besides the synergistic effects between Ni and Fe, fullerene-based carbon support promotes the generation of high-valence Ni3+ species, thus contributing to improved OER performance. The as-synthesized NiFe-OC60 supported on glassy carbon electrode exhibits excellent OER results with a relatively small overpotential of 314 mV at the current density of 10 mA cm−2, and a small Tafel slope of 38.62 mV dec−1 in the alkaline solution. Our work demonstrates fullerene-based materials as promising electrocatalysts for emerging clean-energy related technologies.