Facile surface modification of stainless steel with sulfur for promoting oxygen evolution reaction

Abstract Stainless steel is widely employed as a substrate for electrocatalytic water splitting due to its low cost, high availability, and ease of fabrication. However, its intrinsic oxygen evolution reaction (OER) activity remains nonoptimal, particularly under high current densities. In this study, a simple and energy‐efficient low‐temperature (90°C) liquid‐phase sulfidation method was applied for the surface modification of 316L stainless steel mesh (SSM), which was subsequently transformed into sulfidation SSM (S‐SSM) to enhance the OER activity. The S‐SSM was confirmed by X‐ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy, and X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analyses, and the resulting material exhibited excellent OER performance, which the potential required to reach current densities of 10, 100, and 1000 mAcm −2 were 1.475, 1.523, and 1.603 V, respectively. This work demonstrates that through a simple and low‐energy surface treatment, SSM can be easily transformed into S‐SSM as a high‐performance OER catalyst, showing the great prospect of low‐cost and scalable production toward the realization of electrocatalytic water splitting.