A Universal Strategy for Carbon-Supported Transition Metal Phosphides as High-Performance Bifunctional Electrocatalysts towards Efficient Overall Water Splitting

Exploring cost-effective and general approaches for highly active and stable bifunctional transition metal phosphide (TMP) electrocatalysts towards overall water splitting is greatly desirable and challenging. Herein, a general strategy combining sol-gel and a carbonization-assisted route was proposed to facilely fabricate a series of TMP nanoparticles, including CoP, MoP, FeP, Cu₂P, Ni₂P, PtP₂, FeNiP, CoNiP, and FeCoNiP, coupled in an amorphous carbon matrix with one-step carbon composite formation. The resultant NiFeP@C exhibits excellent activities as a bifunctional electrocatalyst toward oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) with low overpotentials of 260 and 160 mV, respectively, at 10 mA/cm² in 1 M KOH solution. With the NiFeP@C electrocatalyst as both electrode materials, an integrated electrolyzer can deliver 47.0 mA/cm² of current density at 1.60 V, better than the assembled Pt/C20∥IrO₂ counterpart. The encapsulation of NiFeP nanoparticles in the carbon matrix effectively prevents their corrosion and leads to almost unfading catalytic activities for more than 20 h for either the HER, OER, or overall water splitting, outperforming recently reported bifunctional electrocatalysts. The coexistence of Ni, Fe, P, and C would have synergetic effects to accelerate charge transfer and promote electrocatalytic activity. This universal strategy for TMP-based composites opens up a new avenue to explore TMPs as multifunctional materials for various applications.