Enhanced metal-support interaction boosted industrial electrocatalytic water splitting performance of supported Ru nanoparticles on Ni3N/NiO heterojunction

Abstract Developing highly efficient and stable hydrogen production electrocatalysts for water splitting at industrial current densities remains a great challenge. Herein, we fabricated Ru nanoparticle-anchored ultrathin Ni3N/NiO heterostructure nanosheets (Ru-Ni3N/NiO) for efficient electrochemical water splitting (EWS). Density function theory (DFT) calculations demonstrated that the formation of Ni3N/NiO-heterostructures improve the structural stability, electronic distributions, and orbital coupling of Ru-Ni3N/NiO compared to single-phase-metal-carrier catalysts (Ru-Ni3N and Ru-NiO), which increases the electroactivity and further lead to strongly decreased energy barriers for EWS. As a proof-of-concept, the catalyst with oriented 2D nanosheet array morphology, mono-dispersed Ru nanoparticles, and strong metal-support interaction (MSI) was successfully constructed. Furthermore thus-obtained Ru-Ni3N/NiO-based EWS devices can realize an industrial current density of 1000 mA cm−2 at 1.74 V and 1.80 V under alkaline pure water and seawater conditions, respectively. Additionally, high durability of 1000 h (@ 500 mA cm−2) can also be achieved in the alkaline pure water EWS device.