Enhancing Oxygen Evolution Reaction through Modulating Electronic Structure of Trimetallic Electrocatalysts Derived from Metal–Organic Frameworks

Abstract

The construction of efficient, durable, and non-noble metal electrocatalysts for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is of great value but challenging. Herein, a facile method is developed to synthesize a series of trimetallic (W/Co/Fe) metal–organic frameworks (MOFs)-derived carbon nanoflakes (CNF) with various Fe content, and an Fe-dependent volcano-type plot can be drawn out for WCoFex -CNF. The optimized WCoFe0.3-CNF (when the feed ratio of Fe/Co is 0.3) demonstrates superior electrocatalytic performance with a low overpotential of only 254 mV@10 mA cm−2 and excellent durability of 100 h. Further researches show that appropriate amount of iron doping can regulate the electronic structure, resulting in a favorable synergistic environment. This method may stimulate the exploration of electrocatalysts by utilizing MOFs as precursors while realizing electronic modulation by multimetal doping.