Surfactant-Modified Hydrothermal Synthesis of Ca-Doped CuCoO₂ Nanosheets with Abundant Active Sites for Enhanced...

It is urgent to explore cost-effective, high-efficiency, and durable electrocatalysts for electrochemical water splitting due to the rapidly increasing energy consumption. In this work, we successfully synthesize Ca-doped CuCoO₂ nanosheets (CCCO-P NSs) with different Ca²⁺ dopants (such as 3, 5, and 10 atom %) by a surfactant-modified hydrothermal reaction with polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) addition. The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) performances of these CCCO-P NSs in 1.0 M KOH are investigated. An optimal nickel foam supported CCCO-P2 NSs (Ni@CCCO-P2, 5 atom % Ca-doped) electrode requires low overpotential of 470 mV to afford the current density of 10 mA cm^-2 and small Tafel slope of 96.5 mV dec^-1. Furthermore, the Ni@CCCO-P2 electrode displays outstanding long-term stability during the galvanostatic OER electrolysis for 18 h with a little degradation of 32 mV. The improvement of OER performances for CCCO-P2 NSs could be attributed to their higher active surface area, more active sites (Co vacancies defect and Co³⁺/Co⁴⁺ redox pairs), and higher electrical conductivity. This work highlights the joint effect of surfactant and Ca doping for preparing CuCoO₂ with nanosheet-like morphology and porous crystal structure, which is favorable for enhancing their OER performance.