Energy-saving hydrogen production from sulfion oxidation-hybrid seawater splitting enabled by superwettable corrosion-resistant NiFe layered double hydroxide/FeNi 2 S 4 heterostructured nanoarrays

Electrochemical seawater splitting is a sustainable pathway towards hydrogen production independent of scarce freshwater resources. However, the high energy consumption and harmful chlorine-chemistry interference still pose major technological challenges. Herein, thermodynamically more favorable sul...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of colloid and interface science Vol. 673; p. 607
Main Authors Ai, Lunhong, Tian, Yao, Xiao, Tanyang, Zhang, Jiayi, Zhang, Chenghui, Jiang, Jing
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 04.06.2024
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Summary:Electrochemical seawater splitting is a sustainable pathway towards hydrogen production independent of scarce freshwater resources. However, the high energy consumption and harmful chlorine-chemistry interference still pose major technological challenges. Herein, thermodynamically more favorable sulfion oxidation reaction (SOR) is explored to replace energy-intensive oxygen evolution reaction (OER), enabling the dramatically reduced energy consumption and the avoidance of corrosive chlorine species in electrocatalytic systems of NiFe layered double hydroxide (LDH)/FeNi S grown on iron foam (IF) substrate. The resulting NiFe-LDH/FeNi S /IF with superwettable surfaces and favorable heterointerfaces can effectively catalyze SOR and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), which greatly reduces the operational voltage by 1.05 V at 50 mA cm compared to pure seawater splitting and achieves impressively low electricity consumption of 2.33 kW h per cubic meter of H at 100 mA cm . Significantly, benefitting from the repulsive effect of surface sulfate anions to Cl , the NiFe-LDH/FeNi S /IF exhibits outstanding long-term stability for SOR-coupled chlorine-free hydrogen production with sulfion upcycling into elemental sulfur. The present study uncovers the "killing two birds with one stone" effect of SOR for energy-efficient hydrogen generation and value-added elemental sulfur recovery in seawater electrolysis without detrimental chlorine chemistry.
ISSN:1095-7103