Boosting oxygen evolution activity of NiFe layered double hydroxide through interface engineering assisted with naturally-hierarchical wood

Abstract Structural design is the fundamental approach to improve the catalytic properties for oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Herein, an ingenious three-dimensional hierarchical porous heterostructure that well-aligned NiFe layered double hydroxide nanosheets deposited on NiFe nanoparticles and rooted tightly into carbonized wood framework (NiFe-LDHs@NiFe/CW) is developed, and the resultant electrocatalysts perfectly retains the characteristic structure of wood and forms a heterostructure. Benefitting from the abundant hetero-interfaces, optimized electronic configuration, and hierarchical pores, the NiFe-LDHs@NiFe/CW has remarkable electrocatalytic activity and stability toward OER, which possesses a low overpotential of 212 mV at 50 mA cm−2 and insignificant potential increase (≈4.0%) at 50 mA cm−2 for 100 h. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations further reveal that the heterostructures can optimize the electronic structure and have the lowest adsorption energy, thus accelerating the catalytic kinetics. The strategy reported may benefit particularly to utilizing natural and renewable resources to design high-performance electrocatalysts.