In Situ Exfoliated, N-Doped, and Edge-Rich Ultrathin Layered Double Hydroxides Nanosheets for Oxygen Evolution Reaction

The number of catalytically reactive sites and their intrinsic electrocatalytic activity strongly affect the performance of electrocatalysts. Recently, there are growing concerns about layered double hydroxides (LDHs) for oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Exfoliating LDHs is an effective method to increase the reactive sites, however, a traditional liquid phase exfoliation method is usually very labor-intensive and time-consuming. On the other hand, proper heteroelement doping and edge engineering are helpful to tune the intrinsic activity of reactive sites. In this work, bulk CoFe LDHs are successfully exfoliated into ultrathin CoFe LDHs nanosheets by nitrogen plasma. Meanwhile, nitrogen doping and defects are introduced into exfoliated ultrathin CoFe LDHs nanosheets. The number of reactive sites can be increased efficiently by the formation of ultrathin CoFe LDHs nanosheets, the nitrogen dopant alters the surrounding electronic arrangement of reactive site facilitating the adsorption of OER intermediates, and the electrocatalytic activity of reactive sites can be further tuned efficiently by introducing defects which increase the number of dangling bonds neighboring reactive sites and decrease the coordination number of reactive sites. With these advantages, this electrocatalyst shows excellent OER activity with an ultralow overpotential of 233 mV at 10 mA cm(-2).