Exceptional Performance of 3D Additive Manufactured NiFe Phosphite Oxyhydroxide Hollow Tubular Lattice Plastic Electrode for Large-Current-Density Water Oxidization

Abstract

In this article, we report a 3D NiFe phosphite oxyhydroxide plastic electrode using high-resolution digital light processing (DLP) 3D-printing technology via induced chemical deposition method. The as-prepared 3D plastic electrode exhibits no template requirement, freedom design, low-cost, robust, anticorrosion, lightweight, and micro-nano porous characteristics. It can be drawn to the conclusion that highly oriented open-porous 3D geometry structure will be beneficial for improving surface catalytic active area, wetting performance, and reaction–diffusion dynamics of plastic electrodes for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysis process. Density functional theory (DFT) calculation interprets the origin of high activity of NiFe(PO₃)O(OH) and demonstrates that the implantation of the –PO₃ can effectively bind the 3d orbital of Ni in NiFe(PO₃)O(OH), lead to the weak adsorption of intermediate, make electron more active to improve the conductivity, thereby lowing the transform free energy of *O to *OOH. The water oxidization performance of as-prepared 3D NiFe(PO₃)O(OH) hollow tubular (HT) lattice plastic electrode has almost reached the state-of-the-art level compared with the as-reported large-current-density catalysts or 3D additive manufactured plastic/metal-based electrodes, especially for high current OER electrodes. This work breaks through the bottleneck that plagues the performance improvement of low-cost high-current electrodes.