In-situ growth of NiFe-LDH/CuO nanorod-sheet heterostructure for oxygen evolution reaction and urea oxidation reaction

The sluggish kinetics of the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) impede the development of water splitting for hydrogen production. Replacing the anodic oxygen evolution reaction by urea oxidation reaction (UOR) can reduce the thermodynamic equilibrium potential and improve the hydrogen production efficiency. In this work, a NiFe-LDH/CuO heterostructure was constructed via a two-step electrochemical deposition process for both OER and UOR. The nanorod-sheet NiFe-LDH/CuO showed fast electron transfer rate for the CuO nanorod and exposed more active sites for the NiFe-LDH nanosheet. The electron redistribution and d -band center optimization induced by the heterostructure of NiFe-LDH/CuO as revealed by DFT calculation. The synthesized heterostructure catalyst only required overpotential of 238 mV for OER and potential of 1.231 V for UOR, respectively.