Forest-like NiCoP@Cu3P supported on copper foam as a bifunctional catalyst for efficient water splitting

The design of cost-efficient earth-abundant catalysts with superior performance for electrochemical water splitting is highly desirable. Herein, we report a simple and effective approach to fabricate a high-performance NiCoP@Cu3P heterostructure on Cu-foam (NiCoP@Cu3P/CF) for the first time, which has synergistic active sites, large electrochemical surface area, small charge-transfer resistance, efficient mass transport and electron transfer for both the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The optimized NiCoP@Cu3P/CF exhibits a pretty low overpotential of 54 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and a small Tafel slope of 72 mV dec−1 serving as a HER electrocatalyst and also exhibits a low overpotential of 309 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and an extremely small Tafel slope of 42 mV dec−1 serving as an OER electrocatalyst in 1 M KOH.