Nanostructured transition metal compounds coated 3D porous core-shell carbon fiber as monolith water splitting electrocatalysts: A general strategy

Different transition metal compounds (TMCs) nanostructures grown on conductive substrates have been considered as promising self-supportive non-precious electrocatalysts for electrochemical water splitting, but extremely challenging to develop facile and generalized approaches for rational design and enhancing their catalytic properties. Herein, we develop a general strategy to boost the hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions (HER and OER) performance of TMCs by designing monolith electrocatalyst architectures. The monoliths comprises of TMCs integrated on carbon fiber cloth core–shell ([email protected]) structure. The [email protected] allows the creation of numerous lattice distortions and strong electronic interactions between [email protected] and metal cations of the TMCs. Such lattice distortions exposes more active sites in [email protected]/TMCs compared to the pristine CFC coated TMCs (CFC/TMC). Cobalt phosphide (CoP) nanowires and NiFe-LDH coated on [email protected] exhibits the optimized HER and OER activities. Overall water splitting device assembled based on the optimized HER and OER electrodes also achieve low overall potential of 1.53 V at 10 mA cm−2. More importantly, we further experimentally verify that the integration of Ni3N and Ni3S2, CoS2, NiCo-LDH, NiMn-LDH with [email protected] also reveal similar improved performance, providing a general and valuable strategy into the design of other self-supporting electrocatalysts for water splitting and beyond.