Tailoring the Activity of Electrocatalytic Methanol Oxidation on Cobalt Hydroxide by the Incorporation of Catalytically Inactive Zinc Ions.

Catalytically inactive Zn is incorporated into cobalt hydroxide to synthesize hierarchical ZnCo-layered double hydroxide nanosheet networks supported on carbon fiber (ZnCo-LDH/CF). The incorporation of Zn is revealed to endow ZnCo-LDH/CF with significantly superior performance in the aspects of the activity and selectivity for methanol electrooxidation to formic acid and the boosting effect for cathodic hydrogen production compared with the counterpart without Zn. Density functional theory (DFT) calculation reveals that the incorporation of nonactive Zn can increase the density of states near the Fermi level of LDH (i.

Passivating Oxygen Evolution Activity of NiFe-LDH through Heterostructure Engineering to Realize High-Efficiency Electrocatalytic Formate and Hydrogen Co-Production.

An electrocatalytic methanol oxidation reaction (MOR) is proposed to replace oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in water electrolysis owing to the favorable thermodynamics of MOR than OER. However, there is still a competition between the MOR and the OER when the applied potential is in the conventional OER zone. How to inhibit OER while maintaining efficient MOR is an open and challenging question, and there are few reports focusing on this thus far.