An iron-doped nickel diselenide catalyst for highly efficient oxygen evolution reaction

It is a top priority to design low-cost, high catalytic performance of non-noble metal electrocatalysis for renewable energy technology. Herein, undoped and Fe-doped NiSe2 were prepared on carbon cloth through a facile hydrothermal and selenization treatment. Owing to Fe3+ has electron pulling effect, a Fe dopant pulls some electrons away from the adjacent Ni site to reduce the ratio of Ni2+/Ni3+. Further, the introduction of Fe not only contributes to enhancing the adsorption strength of catalyst and OH− for accelerating oxygen evolution reaction (OER) process, but also effectively improves the intrinsic activity and facilitates the charge transfer of the material, resulting in a lower overpotential and satisfactory OER catalytic performance than pure NiSe2. In 1 M KOH, the as-synthesized 20% Fe–NiSe2/CC requires only 221 and 253 mV to be achieved at 10 and 50 mA/cm2, the smaller Tafel slope of 31.8 mV/dec and an excellent stable cycle (24 h). This work may offer insights into the development of OER electrocatalysts with excellent properties and broad application prospects.