Electrodeposition of carbon cloth supported Co-Mo-B bifunctional catalytic electrode for water splitting

Abstract

Water splitting has attracted increasing global interest due to its ability of produce high purity hydrogen, but lack of non-noble metals based bifunctional catalysts with highly active for both hydrogen evolution and oxygen evolution reaction (HER and OER) substantially hinders its applications in large-scale. In this work, we propose a facile approach to fabricate a self-supported Co-Mo-B/CC electrode, via electrodepositing amorphous Co-Mo-B spheres on the carbon cloth (CC) supports. The prepared Co-Mo-B/CC electrode possesses comparable catalytic activity for HER with a low overpotential of 84.5 mV at -10 mA cm-2 (cathodic current density). Meanwhile, it displays high activity for OER with 92.6 mV at 10 mA cm-2 (anodic current density). In addition, the two-electrode electrolysis system of Co-Mo-B/CC(-)//Co-Mo-B/CC(+) exhibits a quite low cell voltage of 1.694 V to drive jcell = 10 mA cm-2 for overall water splitting and outstanding durability, which makes it a promising bifunctional electro-catalyst for both the HER and OER.