Recently, a scientific work entitled “Electrodeposition-Solvothermal Access to Ternary Mixed Metal Ni-Co-Fe Sulfides for Highly Efficient Electrocatalytic Water Oxidation in Alkaline Media” was published online on ElectrochimicaActa. Zhao Xin, the author of this paper from School of Chemical Engineering in UPC, is an undergraduate in 2012 majoring in applied chemistry.
Chai Yongming and Dong Bin, two associate professors from School of Chemical Engineering and School of Science respectively, are corresponding authors, and the first undersigned unit is China University of Petroleum (Hua Dong). The work has gained strong support from the group of Professor Liu Chenguang in the State Key Laboratory of heavy oil and also got guidance on writing from Shang Xiao, a doctoral candidate in 2016 whose major is Chemical Engineering and Technology. Zhao Xin is now accepted by Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences as a bachelor-straight-to-doctorate student.
Electrocatalytic water splitting used to produce hydrogen and oxygen is currently a new promising energy technology which makes use of renewable energy to generate electricity and is also a research hotspot in the field of new energy around the world. Electrocatalysts with high activity and low cost play a critical role in the process of lowering overpotential and catalyzing water decomposition in high efficiency. The build of highly efficient electrocatalysts system for oxygen has become a bottleneck in industrial applications of water electrolysis, especially in terms of half-reaction for generating oxygen which is controlled by chemical kinetics about slow four-electron transfer. Although the transitional metal sulfides are the most potential electrocatalysts for oxygen in high efficiency, there is still much room for improvement in the case of the conductivity and essential activity bits of single metal sulfides. Combining with electrodeposition-solvothermal access, Zhao Xin designed a catalyst system containing ternary mixed metal sulfides based on synergistic effects among various metallic ions and the guiding effects to morphologies of nanostructures, a NiCoFe/NF electrocatalyst was successfully fabricated by improving essential activity and electron transfer rates of ternary sulfides catalysts. The research results show that the ternary mixed metal sulfides catalysts can expose more catalytic active sites and also provide faster electron transfer rates.
This research finding got approval from reviewers considering its higher creativity and the fact that its design ideas provide beneficial references for the design synthesis of transitional metal sulfides catalysts with high activity.
ElectrochimicaActa is the journal of International Society of Electrochemistry. It specializes in the field of electrochemistry and novel energy, mainly publishing the original, outstanding research results of fields related to electrochemistry such as chemistry, energy, catalysis, biology and interdisciplinaries. The journal is the section 1TOP periodical in SCI and ranks third in all journals of electrochemistry. Its average impact factor was up to 4.721 in recent five years.
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http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013468617302177
