New Avenues to MOF Derived Cobalt Chalcogenides for Efficient Electrocatalysis

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as intriguing self-templates for fabricating a plethora of functional materials with excellent activity. Herein, we have developed three different routes useing cobalt imidazolate frameworks (ZIF-67) to design cobalt selenide (CoSe) hybridized with nitrogen doped carbon. The solid-state strategy involves direct conversion of ZIF-67 into CoSe nanoparticles with an average size of 20-25 nm encapsulated within N-doped graphitic carbon shells with an average size of 300 nm. Interestingly, this method can easily be extended to similarly synthesize CoTe encapsulated N-doped graphitic carbon cages by simply changing the precursor. The other method involved the self-templated conversion of ZIF-67 into Co nanoparticles encapsulated N-doped carbon polyhedral and their subsequent transformation into vertically aligned CoSe grafted N-doped carbon sheets via a hydrothermal selenization method. Both, these class of materials so synthesized were found to exhibit excellent electrocatalytic activity towards HER and OER in alkaline medium. It is believed that the methods being developed here may be extended to other transition metal chalcogenides for various applications Figure 1