Intrinsic-structural-modulated carbon cloth as efficient electrocatalyst for water oxidation

A facile synthesis route is designed to fabricate intrinsic-structural-modulated carbon cloth electrocatalyst by N doping for high-efficient water splitting, which dramatically reduces the overpotentials and Tafel slopes towards OER compared to pristine CC. • Intrinsic-structural-modulated carbon cloth (CC) as efficient electrocatalyst is designed. • N incorporation improves the active sites and electron transfer kinitics. • N incorporation optimizes the adsorption energies for intermediates. • N incorporation endows CC with small overpotential and good stability towards OER. Efficient metal-free catalysts for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are challenged for enhancing the efficiency of water electrolysis. Here, an extremely simple one-step calcination route is put forward to synthesize free-standing N-doped C electrocatalyst for the OER. The incorporation of N into carbon cloth (CC) can tune the electronic structure around the C sites for enhancing the reaction active sites and electrical conductivity, and optimizing adsorption energies for intermediates. As expected, the as-prepared CC-9NH 3 -3h electrode demonstrates remarkable OER performance in alkaline medium, affording an extremely low overpotential of 298 mV (@10 mA cm −2 ) and Tafel slope of 62 mV dec −1 , which is comparable to that of a commercial RuO 2 and other promising metal-based OER catalysts. Our findings provide opportunities to explore CC as a new class of self-supporting OER electrocatalyst, and to improve its performance by modulating their intrinsic structure.