Amorphous porous sulfides nanosheets with hydrophilic/aerophobic surface for high-current-density water splitting

The rational construction of electrocatalysts with desired features is significant but challenging for superior water splitting at high current density. Herein, amorphous CoNiS nanosheets are synthesized on nickel foam (NF) through a facile structure evolution strategy and present advanced performance at high current densities in water splitting. The high catalytic activity can be attributed to the sufficient active sites exposed by the flexible amorphous configuration. Moreover, the hydrophilicity and aerophobicity of a-CoNiS/NF promote surface wettability of the self-supporting electrode and avoid the aggregation of bubbles, which expedites the diffusion of electrolyte and facilitates the mass transfer. As a result, the optimized electrode demonstrates low overpotentials of 289 and 434 mV at 500 mA/cm2 under alkaline conditions for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER), respectively. Impressively, an electrolytic water splitting cell assembled by bifunctional a-CoNiS/NF operates with a low cell voltage of 1.46 V@10 mA/cm2 and reaches 1.79 V at 500 mA/cm2. The strategy sheds light on a competitive platform for the reasonable design of non-precious-metal electrocatalysts under high current density.