Electrolytic water splitting for hydrogen production is the highlight among the research efforts to develop efficient, low-cost methods to utilize and store renewable energy to combat the climate change from high emissions of carbon dioxide. A water-splitting reaction is divided into two half reactions that consist of production of hydrogen (hydrogen evolution reaction, HER) and oxygen (oxygen evolution reaction, OER). For practical applications on a large scale, however, both OER and HER require low-cost, low over potential, and earth-abundant catalysts to enhance and speed up the reaction. Here, we report nanostructural Ni/Fe oxides NiFeOx grown on carbon nanostructures derived from algal cells as efficient OER electrocatalysts. Oculata algal cells were used as a biotemplate to synthetize carbon nanostructures by pyrolysis using a silica template approach from silica precursor tetramethoxysilane. NiFeOx nanoparticles were then grown on the carbonized cells (cCells) by a hydrothermal reaction, forming a NiFeOx-cCell composite (NiFeOx@cCells). The structure of the composite was analyzed by transmission electron microscopy and the OER electrocatalytic properties were studied by cyclic voltammetry and linear sweep voltammetry. We found that the OER performance and the stability of NiFeOx@cCells are superior to Ir/C benchmark OER catalyst, which will be discussed in detail.

Algal oculata biotemplated water-splitting nanocatalysts nickel/iron oxides

255th National Meeting (2018)

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