Electronic Structure Engineering of NiCoP Sites via N, Ru Dual Doping for Bifunctional Water Electrolysis

Exploiting highly effective electrocatalysts is a challenge for boosting the overall efficiency of water splitting. Herein, we present a nitrogen and ruthenium dual-doping strategy to tailor the electronic structures of NiCoP(N, Ru-NiCoP), creating high-performance bifunctional electrodes for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The dual-doping approach is favorable for electronic interactions within the NiCoP and CoP, yielding a near-zero Gibbs free energy for H adsorption. Consequently, the optimized N, Ru-NiCoP electrodes exhibit exceptional bifunctional activities, with overpotentials of 53 and 405 mV at 100 mA cm^-2 for the HER and OER, respectively. Notably, their performance surpasses that of commercial Pt/C and RuO₂ catalysts at large current densities, demonstrating their potential for industrial water splitting applications. Moreover, the overall water-splitting device achieves a current density of 10 mA cm^-2 with a driving voltage of only 1.54 V. This work provides an effective heteroatom doping strategy to develop low-cost and highly active electrocatalysts.