Oxygen Vacancies Dominated NiS2 /CoS2 Interface Porous Nanowires for Portable Zn-Air Batteries Driven Water Splitting Devices

Jie Yin; Yuxuan Li; Fan Lv; Min Lu; Ke Sun; Wei Wang; Lei Wang; Fangyi Cheng; Yefei Li; Pinxian Xi; Shaojun Guo

doi:10.1002/adma.201704681

Oxygen Vacancies Dominated NiS₂ /CoS₂ Interface Porous Nanowires for Portable Zn-Air Batteries Driven Water Splitting Devices

Adv Mater. 2017 Dec;29(47). doi: 10.1002/adma.201704681. Epub 2017 Nov 2.

Authors

Jie Yin¹, Yuxuan Li¹, Fan Lv^{2

3

4}, Min Lu¹, Ke Sun¹, Wei Wang¹, Lei Wang⁵, Fangyi Cheng⁶, Yefei Li⁷, Pinxian Xi¹, Shaojun Guo^{2

3

4}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Applied Organic Chemistry, Key Laboratory of Nonferrous Metal Chemistry and Resources Utilization of Gansu Province, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, China.
² Department of Materials Science & Engineering, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
³ BIC-ESAT, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Theory and Technology of Advanced Batteries Materials, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
⁵ College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, 266042, China.
⁶ Key Laboratory of Advanced Energy Materials Chemistry (Ministry of Education), College of Chemistry, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300071, China.
⁷ Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Material, Key Laboratory of Computational Physical Science (Ministry of Education), Shanghai Key Laboratory of Molecular Catalysis and Innovative Materials, Department of Chemistry, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China.

PMID: 29239518
DOI: 10.1002/adma.201704681

Abstract

The development of highly active and stable oxygen evolution reaction (OER) electrocatalysts is crucial for improving the efficiency of water splitting and metal-air battery devices. Herein, an efficient strategy is demonstrated for making the oxygen vacancies dominated cobalt-nickel sulfide interface porous nanowires (NiS₂ /CoS₂ -O NWs) for boosting OER catalysis through in situ electrochemical reaction of NiS₂ /CoS₂ interface NWs. Because of the abundant oxygen vacancies and interface porous nanowires structure, they can catalyze the OER efficiently with a low overpotential of 235 mV at j = 10 mA cm^-2 and remarkable long-term stability in 1.0 m KOH. The home-made rechargeable portable Zn-air batteries by using NiS₂ /CoS₂ -O NWs as the air-cathode display a very high open-circuit voltage of 1.49 V, which can maintain for more than 30 h. Most importantly, a highly efficient self-driven water splitting device is designed with NiS₂ /CoS₂ -O NWs as both anode and cathode, powered by two-series-connected NiS₂ /CoS₂ -O NWs-based portable Zn-air batteries. The present work opens a new way for designing oxygen vacancies dominated interface nanowires as highly efficient multifunctional electrocatalysts for electrochemical reactions and renewable energy devices.

Keywords: Zn-air batteries; interface catalysis; oxygen vacancies; porous nanowires; water splitting.