Cation-Anion Dual Doping Modifying Electronic Structure of Hollow CoP Nanoboxes for Enhanced Water Oxidation Electrocatalysis

Tuning the electronic state of a nanocatalyst is of vital importance for elevating its catalytic performance toward oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Herein, a cation-anion dual doping strategy has been proposed for modifying the electronic structure of CoP via doping Fe and S atoms. Impressively, Fe doping has been demonstrated to be favorable for improving the carrier density of CoP to produce more hydroxyl radicals (center dot OH), while S doping can further modify the electronic structure of CoP to improve the charge-transfer characteristics, thereby synergisti-cally decreasing the energy barrier for the transformation of O* to OOH* and promoting the electrocatalytic OER performance. More importantly, the highly open nanobox structure is also beneficial for the exposure of more accessible catalytically active sites, which can substantially facilitate the electron and mass transport, leading to the superb catalytic OER performance. The successful modulation of OER performance via dual-doping strategy will pose a new strategy for designing more advanced nanocatalysts for energy-related catalysis process.

Automated summary

This study proposes a dual-doping strategy by doping Fe and S atoms to improve the electronic structure of CoP and enhance its electrocatalytic OER performance. By adjusting the carrier density and charge transfer characteristics, and utilizing the highly open nanobox structure to expose more active sites, excellent catalytic performance is achieved.