Boronization-Induced Ultrathin 2D Nanosheets with Abundant Crystalline-Amorphous Phase Boundary Supported on Nickel Foam toward Efficient Water Splitting

The conversion of crystalline metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) into metal compounds/carbon hybrid nanocomposites via pyrolysis provides a promising solution to design electrocatalysts for electrochemical water splitting. However, pyrolyzing MOFs generally involves a complex high-temperature treatment, which can destroy the coordinated surroundings within MOFs, and as a result not taking their full advantage of their electrolysis properties. Herein, a simple and room-temperature boronization strategy is developed to convert nickel zeolite imidazolate framework (Ni-ZIF) nanorods into ultrathin Ni-ZIF/Ni-B nanosheets with abundant crystalline-amorphous phase boundaries. The combined experiment, and theoretical calculation results disclose that the ultrathin thickness allows fast electron transfer and ensures increased exposure of surface coordinatively unsaturated active sites while the crystalline-amorphous interface elaborately changes the potential-determining step to energetically favorable intermediates. As a result, Ni-ZIF/Ni-B nanosheets supported on nickel foam (NF) require overpotentials of 67 mV for the hydrogen evolution reaction and 234 mV for the oxygen evolution reaction to achieve a current density of 10 mA cm(-2). Remarkably, Ni-ZIF/Ni-B@NF as a bifunctional electrocatalyst for overall water splitting enables an alkaline electrolyzer with 10 mA cm(-2) at an ultralow cell voltage of 1.54 V. The present work may open a new avenue to the design of MOF-derived composites for electrocatalysis.