High-entropy effect of a metal phosphide on enhanced overall water splitting performance

High-entropy materials have gained extensive attention owing to their unique structural characteristics and outstanding properties. The synthesis of high-entropy compounds, particularly high-entropy metal phosphides, has been seldom reported because of the incompatibility between different metals and non-metals. Herein, we propose a one-step low temperature sol–gel strategy to overcome the incompatibility and synthesize high-entropy metal phosphide (HEMP) NiCoFeMnCrP nanoparticles on a carbon matrix. Due to the synergistic effect among the metal elements, NiCoFeMnCrP exhibits supernormal catalytic activities for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and overall water splitting. The fact that the overpotentials for the OER and HER decrease with the increase of the metal species number demonstrates that the realization of high entropy has great effects on performance enhancement. Our work provides a facile and viable synthesis strategy for preparing high entropy compounds which would offer great potential in energy and electrocatalysis applications by entropy engineering.