Facile and Scalable Synthesis of Robust Ni(OH)2 Nanoplate Arrays on NiAl Foil as Hierarchical Active Scaffold for Highly Efficient Overall Water Splitting

Abstract

Developing highly efficient low-cost electrocatalysts for both hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in alkaline electrolyte is essential to advance water electrolysis technology. Herein, Ni(OH)2 nanoplates aligned on NiAl foil (Ni(OH)2/NiAl) are developed by simply dealloying NiAl foil in KOH, which exhibits high electrocatalytic activity for OER with a small overpotential of 289 mV to achieve 10 mA cm−2 and outstanding durability with no detectable degradation during long-term operation. Furthermore, such Ni(OH)2/NiAl can effectively act as an active and robust hierarchical scaffold to simply electrodeposit other catalysts with intrinsically higher activity ..