Amorphous cobalt boride nanosheets anchored surface-functionalized carbon nanofiber: An bifunctional and efficient catalyst for electrochemical sensing and oxygen evolution reaction.

Abstract Development of new metal boride with carbon composite is an emerging class of catalyst and it brings enormous curiosity in the material community because of their potential intriguing properties. Here, we describe a new type of amorphous cobalt boride (A-CoB) nanosheet anchored on the surface of functionalized carbon nanofiber (A-CoB/ƒ-CNF) by a simple method. The emerged A-CoB/ƒ-CNF composite was demonstrated to possess great bifunctional electrocatalytic activity for the electrochemical sensing of antibiotic drug nitrofurantoin (NFT) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The prepared A-CoB/ƒ-CNF composite was characterized by various analytical and spectroscopic techniques such as XRD, FE-SEM, HR-TEM, Raman, and XPS analysis. The result from the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy confirms that the A-CoB/ƒ-CNF composite shows high electrical conductivity and the number of electron transferability for the NFT sensor and OER which is due to the presence of abundant active sites/large surface area in A-CoB, and synergistic effect between the A-CoB and ƒ-CNF. As an electrochemical sensor, the A-CoB/ƒ-CNF modified electrode shows substantial sensitivity (3.13 μA μM–1 cm–2), wider linear response range (0.01 – 527 μM), and lower detection limit (0.003 μM) as-compared to the previously reported noble and non-noble metal-based electrocatalyst for NFT sensor. As well, the A-CoB/ƒ-CNF composite demonstrates superior OER activity with low overpotential and small Tafel slope value of 0.35 V and 173 mV/dec, respectively, which shows advanced kinetics than noble metal catalysts. Based on the results, we believed that the present work gives clear evidence for the preparation of transition metal boride anchored carbon material with an outstanding catalytic activity, and hence, it can be also extended to further electrochemical applications.