Tailored Crafting of Core-Shell Cobalt-Hydroxides@Polyfluoroaniline Nanostructures with Strongly Coupled Interfaces and Improved Hydrophilicity to Enable Efficient Oxygen Evolution

Recently, core-shell structured nanomaterials have displayed great potential as electrocatalysts for highly efficient oxygen evolution reaction (OER). However, the controllable synthesis of a core-shell structure to achieve optimal OER performance remains a great challenge. In this work, we reported the crafting of a cobalt-hydroxides@polyfluoroaniline (Co(OH)(2)@PFANI) core-shell structure via a facile route of in situ polymerization. This strategy has good control over the thickness of the PFANI shell, which can be as thin as similar to 1.7 nm. Because of the unique composition (i.e., high electronegative F- anion) and thin thickness of the PFANI shell, the core-shell-structured Co(OH)(2)@PFANI demonstrated a synergy of electronic and interface engineering, leading to the optimization of electronic structures and hydrophilicity, strongly coupled hetero-interfaces of Co(OH)(2) and PFANI, highly exposed active sites, and accelerated charge transfer. As a result, the as-synthesized core-shell Co(OH)(2)@PFANI structure displays excellent performance for OER with a small overpotential of 265 mV at 10 mA cm(-2), surpassing most reported non-noble OER electrocatalysts. Therefore, this work provides new strategies for the rational design and crafting of advanced core-shell structures for efficient electrocatalysis.