Hollow Porous Heterometallic Phosphide Nanocubes for Enhanced Electrochemical Water Splitting

Highly efficient earth-abundant electrocatalysts for both hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are of great importance for renewable energy conversion systems. Herein, hollow porous heterometallic phosphide nanocubes are developed as a highly active and robust catalyst for electrochemical water splitting via one-step phosphidation of a NiCoFe Prussian blue analogue. Through modulation of the composition of metals in the precursors, the optimal NiCoFeP exhibiting increased electrical conductivity and abundant electrochemically active sites, leading to high electrocatalytic activities and outstanding kinetics for both HER and OER, is successfully obtained. NiCoFeP shows low overpotentials of 273 mV for OER and 131 mV for HER at a current density of 10 mA cm-2 and quite low Tafel slopes of 35 mV dec-1 for OER and 56 mV dec-1 for HER.