Recently, it has been demonstrated that nanostructural Ni/Fe oxides NiFeOx grown on three-dimensional carbon nanostructures are efficient oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts. However, the carbon nanostructures are usually synthesized with multiple steps, which could involve high temperature annealing (&gt;300 °C). In this work, we implemented a new strategy by using algal cells as a biotemplate for growing NiFeOx nanoparticles for OER under relatively mild and facile conditions. The approach involves the adsorption of metal ions on the algal cells, followed by NaOH treatments under different conditions to convert the metal ions to metal hydroxides and fix them in the cells. The resulting mixtures were then treated by hydrothermal reactions at 180 °C to form NiFeOx-Cell composites. The formation processes with NaOH treatments at different temperatures (&lt;110 °C) were systematically tested. The resulting samples were characterized by scanning electron microscopy and their OER electrocatalytic properties were studied by cyclic voltammetry and linear sweep voltammetry. The OER performance and stability of NiFeOx-Cell composites will be discussed in detail, based on their synthetic conditions, and compare with benchmark OER catalyst Ir/C.

Algae-biotemplated water-splitting nanocatalysts for efficient oxygen evolution reaction

255th National Meeting (2018)

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