Nickel iron alloy embedded, nitrogen doped porous carbon catalyst for efficient water electrolysis

Metal-support electronic interaction is a feasible way to enhance the catalytic activity and bifunctionality for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), and further the easily water elec-trolysis for hydrogen production at low cost. Herein, NiFe alloy embedded in N doped carbon support hybrid (NiFe@NC) was prepared by pyrolysis of metal ions impregnated bamboo precursor. In this NiFe@NC hybrid, the surface (oxy)hydroxide layer of alloy led to high OER efficiency (overpotential of 270 mV at 10 mA cm-2), and the alloy-support interaction enabled high catalytic efficiency for HER (overpotential of 206 mV at-10 mA cm-2). Benefitted by the bifunctional features, the symmetric water electrolyzer based on two identical NiFe@NC electrodes demonstrated acceptable input voltage and high faradaic efficiencies (FEs) for water electrolysis. The current work offers a feasible showcase for fulfilling of bifunctional catalyses in water electrolysis via the metal -support electronic interaction.