Phosphorus doping and Sulfur vacancies defect engineering for efficient electrocatalytic water-splitting by modulating the electronic structure of the Cobalt sulfide with synergy effect

The advance of cost-effective electrocatalyst for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is important to understand the commercialization of electrocatalytic water splitting. The synergistic effects of heteroatomic doping and vacancies engineering are efficient, which coordinates and improves catalytic performance, but is still difficult. Herein, we report that the phosphorus-doped CoS nanosheets with sulfur vacancies (P-CoS) are synthesized through sulfurization and phosphidation process. The optimal catalyst exhibits excellent electrocatalytic activity by controlling P doping and sulfur vacancies (S vacancies), providing a low overpotential (280 mV at 10 mA cm−2), a low tafel slope (79.38 mV dec−1), a TOF value of (0.019 s−1) and outstanding stability (92.3% for 15 h) for OER under alkaline conditions. This easy way supplies new insights into the synthesis of novel metal sulfide material. Therefore, this gives an instruction strategy to fulfill effective non-precious metal catalysts for energy conversion and storage.