Amorphous Fe-Co-Ni oxide for oxygen evolution reaction

Development of scalable, efficient and stable nonprecious metal electrocatalysts for oxygen evolution is of great significance in electrochemical water splitting. Multicomponent metal mixed oxides with controlled structures and compositions are recently considered as promising candidates to realize efficient oxygen evolution reaction at low overpotential. Herein, a Fe-Co-Ni gel with uniform dispersion of Fe/Co/Ni is prepared by a facile sol-gel method, followed by a vacuum drying process to obtain an amorphous ternary Fe-Co-Ni oxide. Of note, this strategy can be extended to synthesize other amorphous multicomponent metal oxides in force. Benefiting from the structural and compositional advantages, the as-prepared FeCoNiOx exhibits superior electrocatalytic performance for the oxygen evolution reaction in alkaline solution with an overpotential of only 240 and 203 mV at a current density of 10 mA cm(-2) on a glassy carbon electrode and Ni foam electrode, respectively. The present approach provides some insight in design and synthesis of amorphous multicomponent metal oxide materials for energy storage and conversion applications. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.