Facile Preparation of Ultrathin Co₃ O₄ /Nanocarbon Composites with Greatly Improved Surface Activity as a Highly...

The efficient catalytic oxidation of water to dioxygen plays a significant role in solar fuel and artificial photosynthetic systems. It remains highly challenging to develop oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts with high activity and low cost under mild conditions. Here, a new composite material is reported based on ultrathin 2D Co₃ O₄ nanosheets and reduced graphene oxides (rGO) by means of a one-pot hydrothermal strategy. The ultrathin Co₃ O₄ /rGO nanocomposite shows superior stability under alkaline conditions and exhibits an overpotential of 290 mV with a Tafel slope of 68 mA dec^-1 , which is much smaller than that of bare Co₃ O₄ catalyst. Extensive experiments were also carried out using 0D CS and 1D CNTs (CS=carbon spheres, CNTs=carbon nanotubes) in place of the 2D rGO. The overpotentials of as-prepared nanocomposites decrease with the increase of the dimension of nanocarbons, suggesting the electrochemistry activity is closely related to the surface area of carbon substrates. In addition, compared with ultrathin 2D Co₃ O₄ nanosheets with a Co²⁺ /Co³⁺ ratio of 1.2, the as-prepared ultrathin Co₃ O₄ /rGO nanocomposite with a Co²⁺ /Co³⁺ ratio of 1.4 contributes to the better OER performance as more oxygen vacancies can be formed in the ultrathin Co₃ O₄ /rGO nanocomposite under the experimental conditions. Compared with other Co₃ O₄ -containing composite materials reported so far, the ultrathin Co₃ O₄ /rGO nanocomposites show excellent OER performance.