Electroless Plating of Highly Efficient Bifunctional Boride‐Based Electrodes toward Practical Overall Water Splitting

Abstract

Abstract Exploring highly‐efficient and low‐cost electrodes for both hydrogen and oxygen evolution reaction (HER and OER) is of primary importance to economical water splitting. Herein, a series of novel and robust bifunctional boride‐based electrodes are successfully fabricated using a versatile Et 2 NHBH 3 ‐involved electroless plating (EP) approach via deposition of nonprecious boride‐based catalysts on various substrates. Owing to the unique binder‐free porous nodule structure induced by the hydrogen release EP reaction, most of the nonprecious boride‐based electrodes are highly efficient for overall water splitting. As a distinctive example, the Co‐B/Ni electrode can afford 10 mA cm −2 at overpotentials of only 70 mV for HER and 140 mV for OER, and can also survive at large current density of 1000 mA cm −2 for over 20 h without performance degradation in 1.0 m KOH. Several boride‐based two‐electrode electrolyzers can achieve 10 mA cm −2 at low voltages of around 1.4 V. Moreover, the facile EP approach is economically viable for flexible and large size electrode production.