Oxygen vacancy assisted low-temperature synthesis of P-doped Co3O4 with enhanced activity towards oxygen evolution reaction

Doping non-metal atoms into transition metal oxides (TMO) is considered as an effective method to improve the catalytic performance of TMO. Nevertheless, it is actually not easy to achieve efficient non-metal doping in TMO. To address this issue, herein, we for the first time put forwards an oxygen vacancy (V-o) assisted doping strategy to achieve high non-metal atoms doping amount in TMO. Firstly, V-o is produced by simple acid etching treatment on pristine Co3O4, and then the obtained V-o decorated Co3O4 (Co3O4-V-o) is used as precursor to conduct P doping. By systematical characterizations and analysis, it is found that the as-formed V-o in Co3O4-V-o plays a role of doping sites, which bring about efficient P doping effect. Even at relatively low temperature, the as-prepared P-doped Co3O4-V-o (P-Co3O4-V-o) is evidenced to display a high P doping amount of 6.1 wt%, which is much higher than that (1.9 wt%) of directly P-doped Co3O4 (P-Co3O4). Consequently, P-doped Co3O4-V-o shows significantly enhanced activity towards oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Clearly, this work opens a new avenue to efficiently doping non-metal atoms into TMO. (C) 2021 Published by Elsevier B.V.