Highly Efficient Oxygen Evolution by a Thermocatalytic Process Cascaded Electrocatalysis Over Sulfur‐Treated Fe‐Based Metal–Organic‐Frameworks

Abstract

Abstract The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is a bottleneck process for water splitting and finding highly efficient, durable, low‐cost, and earth‐abundant electrocatalysts is still a major challenge. Here a sulfur‐treated Fe‐based metal–organic‐framework is reported as a promising electrocatalyst for the OER, which shows a low overpotential of 218 mV at the current density of 10 mA cm −2 and exhibits a very low Tafel slope of 36.2 mV dec −1 at room temperature. It can work on high current densities of 500 and 1000 mA cm −2 at low overpotentials of 298 and 330 mV, respectively, by keeping 97% of its initial activity after 100 h. Notably, it can achieve 1000 mA cm −2 at 296 mV with a good stability at 50 °C, fully fitting the requirements for large‐scale industrial water electrolysis. The high catalytic performance can be attributed to the thermocatalytic processes of H + capture by –SO 3 groups from *OH or *OOH species, which cascades to the electrocatalytic pathway and then significantly reduces the OER overpotentials.