Fabrication of Hollow CoP/TiOx Heterostructures for Enhanced Oxygen Evolution Reaction

Transition-metal phosphides have flourished as promising candidates for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) electrocatalysts. Herein, it is demonstrated that the electrocatalytic OER performance of CoP can be greatly improved by constructing a hybrid CoP/TiOx heterostructure. The CoP/TiOx heterostructure is fabricated using metal-organic framework nanocrystals as templates, which leads to unique hollow structures and uniformly distributed CoP nanoparticles on TiOx. The strong interactions between CoP and TiOx in the CoP/TiOx heterostructure and the conductive nature of TiOx with Ti3+ sites endow the CoP-TiOx hybrid material with high OER activity comparable to the state-of-the-art IrO2 or RuO2 OER electrocatalysts. In combination with theoretical calculations, this work reveals that the formation of CoP/TiOx heterostructure can generate a pathway for facile electron transport and optimize the water adsorption energy, thus promoting the OER electrocatalysis.