Construction of Co3O4/CeO2 heterostructure nanoflowers facilitates deployment of oxygen defects to enhance the oxygen evolution kinetics

The bottom-up design strategy can more rationally optimize the composition and structure of the materials to impart excellent oxygen evolution reaction (OER) performance. Heterostructures can modulate electronic behavior through interface construction to optimize materials properties for superior OER performance. In this paper, we created abundant Co3O4/CeO2 phase interfaces to tune the grain size, the electronic con-figuration of cobalt sites, and the content of oxygen defects in Co3O4, which increases the number of active sites, enhances the electronic conductivity of the material, and optimized the adsorption energy for reaction intermediates. Moreover, the assembly of nanograins into nanoflowers with a three-dimensional hier-archical pore structure can provide more effective active sites, abundant pores and channels for mass transport, and discrete cavities for in-depth reactions of intermediates. The construction of Co3O4/CeO2 heterostructure nanoflowers (CoCe HNFs) contributes to the excellent OER performance of the catalyst. (c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.