Molybdenum sulfide/Ni:FeOOH heterostructures as efficient water oxidation electrocatalysts in alkaline media

Sluggish oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is considered to be the bottleneck that restricts the usage of electrocatalytic water splitting to generate hydrogen. With this in mind, we demonstrate the design and preparation of a series of Mo15S19/Ni:FeOOH heterostructures toward water oxidation. As expected, the considerable acceleration of OER process is achieved by the combination of Mo15S19 with Ni:FeOOH, due to the formation of heterojunction. Under the optimized conditions, the as-prepared Mo15S19/Ni:FeOOH-21 exhibits a lower overpotential (214 mV vs RHE at 10 mA cm−2) than other control samples. The OER activity of Mo15S19/Ni:FeOOH-21 is found to be comparable to and/or better than the state-of-the-art OER electrocatalysts reported in the literature recently, making it a promising OER electrocatalyst in the industrial water electrolysis. This work opens up an efficient avenue to rational design of other high-performance composite OER electrocatalysts.