Facile nitridation of MoNi alloy with optimized electronic structure toward boosted overall hydrazine splitting (OHzS) assisted by solar light
Description
Hydrazine oxidation reaction (HzOR)-assisted hydrogen production enables energy- efficiency and performance improvement by avoiding sluggish oxygen evolution reaction (OER), yet its catalyst development is hindered by complex synthesis and limited external field integration. Herein, we reported a cost-effective and scalable approach to construct MoNi alloy-derived nitride catalysts via one-step ammonia nitridation. The optimized catalysts exhibited a tailored electronic structure derived from d-electron complementation between Ni and Mo, promoting hydrazine dehydrogenation kinetics and hydrogen adsorption. Under rational design, the potentials could reach as low as -0.24 V for HER and 0.046 V for HzOR at a high current density exceeding 600 mA cm-2 in alkaline electrolyte, which is comparable to the state-of-the-art materials in references. Furthermore, full-cell operation demonstrated cell voltages as low as 0.01 V and 0.109 V at 10 and 100 mA cm-2, respectively. Thanks to the solar light assistance, there was an 87.4% energy consumption reduction for HER at 10 mA cm-2 and a 78.1% reduction for HzOR at 50 mA cm-2. We provided a viable route in this work to engineer alloy-derived nitride electrocatalysts integrated with light-field enhancement for energy-saving hydrogen production.