Bifunctional CoP electrocatalysts for overall water splitting

Overall water splitting becomes an important strategy for the generation of hydrogen and oxygen in today's needs of green energy. Therefore, it is important to develop bifunctional electrocatalysts with cheap and high-efficient characteristics. However, traditional bifunctional catalysts usually exhibit high overpotential and poor stability during both hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Herein, we synthesized several kinds of CoP nanorod catalysts through a facile hydrothermal method and subsequent thermal phosphorization process. The as-obtained CoP-1.5 product showed an overpotential of 58 mV for HER at 10 mA cm(-2) and 284 mV for OER at 50 mV cm(-2) in 1 M KOH. Moreover, the bifunctional catalyst, delivered a cell voltage of 1.66 Vat 50 mA cm(-2).

Automated summary

Water splitting is an important strategy for green energy generation, and cheap and efficient bifunctional catalysts are crucial for this process. However, traditional catalysts have limitations in terms of overpotential and stability. In this study, CoP nanorod catalysts were synthesized to address these issues and showed improved performance.