Design and Synthesis of Highly Performing Bifunctional Ni-NiO-MoNi Hybrid Catalysts for Enhanced Urea Oxidation and Hydrogen Evolution Reactions

In order to provide solutions for the pollution caused by nitrogen-containing wastewater and the shortage of fossil fuels, it is urgent to design highly performing bifunctional catalysts for the urea oxidation reaction (UOR) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Herein, asok-like Ni-NiO-Mo0.84Ni0.16/NF hybrids are synthesized via hydrothermal and calcination methods. They exhibit superior catalytic activities for UOR (1.33 V at 50 mA cm–2), higher than the ever-reported NiMo-based catalysts, and for HER (0.069 V at 50 mA cm–2). Furthermore, the decline in catalytic performance is negligible after operating for 60 h at 250 mA cm–2. We suppose that the reason could be attributed to the special asok-like structure, a self-supported structure formed with 3D nickel foam (NF) and the three-phase hybrids. This work proposes a new strategy for the preparation of asok-like NiMo-based cost-effective catalysts, highly performing for both nitrogen-containing wastewater treatment and large-scale H2 production.