Recently, Associate Professor Gao Xiaorui of the School of Electronic Information Engineering, as the first author, published a paper in the famous international energy science journal "Nano Energy" (the first area of the Chinese Academy of Sciences SCI journal zone, IF=16.602) "Synergizing In-grown Ni3N/Ni Heterostructured Core and Ultrathin Ni3N Surface Shell Enables Self-adaptive Surface Reconfiguration and Efficient Oxygen Evolution Reaction".
Oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is a key electrochemical process for energy storage and conversion, such as rechargeable metal-air batteries, water splitting, carbon dioxide reduction, and fuel cells. However, due to the four-electron transfer, its kinetics is slow, and an efficient catalyst is needed to overcome the large overpotential and obtain a sufficiently high current density. Therefore, the design of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts with high activity, stable alkalinity and low cost is the key to solving this problem. It has great value but still faces huge challenges. In this paper, a step-by-step thermal nitridation route was used to design a strongly coupled core-shell nanostructured catalyst composed of an ingrown Ni3N/Ni heterostructure core and an ultra-thin Ni3N shell (Ni3N/Ni@Ni3N). Ni3N/Ni@Ni3N achieves an ultra-low overpotential (η) of 229 mV at a current density of 10 mA cm-2. When η= 270 mV, compared with Ni3N and Ni alone and commercial RuO2, the effective surface area per unit The catalytic current densities of the catalysts were increased by 17, 37, and 20 times, and the Tafel slope was greatly reduced to only 55 mV dec-1.
Teacher Xiaorui Gao came to work in our university in 2016 and is currently an associate professor in the School of Electronic Information Engineering, undertaking the courses of "Photovoltaic Materials", "New Energy Vehicle Power Batteries", and "Basics of Materials Science". The current research direction is the structure design and electrochemical performance of energy storage and conversion materials. From September 2018 to March 2020, she was a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore sponsored by the China Scholarship Council. And she has been funded by the National Natural Science Foundation Youth Fund, the Provincial Natural Science Foundation Youth Fund, and the scientific research project of the Provincial Department of Education. In 2016, she was funded by the Suzhou Municipality's shortage of high-level talents. Since coming to school in 2016, he has been the first author and the corresponding author in Adv. Funct. Mater. (IF: 16.836), Nano Energy (IF: 16.602), ACS Catal. (IF: 12.35), J. Mater. Chem. A (IF:11.301), ACS Appl. Catal. B (IF:16.683), ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces (IF:8.758), ChemSusChem (IF:7.962) published 7 SCI (District 1) academic papers in top international journals.
Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nanoen.2020.105355
