Elemental Charge Engineering in Cobalt and Cobalt-Phosphide Interface for Enhanced Oxygen Evolution and Urea Oxidation Reactions

The development of cost-effective electrocatalysts with high performance for oxygen evolution and urea oxidation reaction (OER/UOR) is desirable but remains a great challenge. Here, we report a facile strategy for boron-doping cobalt and cobalt-phosphide interfacial electrocatalysts (B-Co/Co2P) for bifunctional OER/UOR. By virtue of B doping, the abundant exposed active sites as well as enhanced electrical conductivity can efficiently improve charge migration of the heterogeneous interfacial sites. Therefore, the obtained B-Co/Co2P electrocatalysts exhibit bifunctional OER/UOR activities with an outstanding overpotential of 284 and 107 mV at an industrial current density of 100 mA cm(-2), respectively. Such an excellent catalytic performance is attributed to the fact that the B dopant adjusts the electron distribution of interfacial catalytic sites and optimizes the adsorption/desorption of reaction intermediate species, as well as reduces the energy barriers of water oxidation. Furthermore, the setup two-electrode cell requires merely overpotentials of 280.7 and 56.9 mV to drive 10 mA cm(-2) with robust stability in water splitting and urea electrolysis, respectively. Overall, this report provides a strategy to construct bifunctional OER/UOR catalysts with high efficiency for hydrogen generation.