Nickel foam as conductive substrate enhanced low-crystallinity two-dimensional iron hydrogen phosphate for oxygen evolution reaction

Cheap and excellent conductive substrates with large and manipulated geometric area have become an indispensable research object for non-self-supporting OER electrode materials to achieve the practical application. In this study, low-crystallinity 2D morphology iron hydrogen phosphate material (FPO3) with thickness of 12–16 nm is obtained by an easy polyol refluxing method. Its overpotential drop-casted on nickel foam (FPO3/NF) for OER is just 309 mV at the current density of 10 mA cm−2. Through the detailed comparative analysis, its number and the intrinsic activity of active sites for OER effectively enhanced because of the two-dimensional morphology, the low crystallinity, the excellent redox activity of iron, and the more beneficial synergy between NF and FPO3. Those results also indicate that using NF as the substrate is a high-efficiency method to realize the practical application of non-self-supporting electromaterials by a simple drop-casted treatment.