Heteroatom-Doped Nickel Sulfide for Efficient Electrochemical Oxygen Evolution Reaction

Heteroatom doping is an effective strategy to regulate electrocatalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Nonmetal heteroatoms can effectively engineer geometric and electronic structures and activating surface sites of catalysts due to their unique radius and the electronegativity of nonmetal atoms. Hence, the surface geometric and electronic structure and activity of nonmetal atoms (X, X = B, C, N, O, P)-doped Ni3S2 (X-Ni3S2) were studied to screen high-performance Ni3S2-based OER electrocatalysts through density functional theory calculation. Theoretical results demonstrated that dopants in X-Ni3S2 can alter bond length and charge of surface, modify active sites for intermediates adsorption, and adjust the theoretical overpotential. Among all dopants, C can effectively modulate surface structure, activate surface sites, weaken the adsorption of key intermediates, decrease theoretical overpotential, and enable C-Ni3S2 with the best theoretical OER activity among all X-Ni3S2 with the lowest theoretical overpotential (0.46 eV). Further experimental results verified that the synthesized C-Ni3S2 performed an improved OER activity in the alkaline condition with a considerably enhanced overpotential of 261 mV at 10 mA cm−2 as well as a Tafel slope of 95 mV dec−1 compared to pristine Ni3S2