Exceptional electrocatalytic oxygen evolution efficiency and stability from electrodeposited NiFe alloy on Ni foam

Highly efficient and low-cost electrocatalysts toward oxygen evolution reaction (OER) hold their promises in renewable energy technologies such as water splitting. Herein, we reported a fast electrodeposition of highly efficient NiFe alloy onto three-dimension nickel foam (NF). Benefiting from the hierarchical structure, NiFe/NF exhibits high OER efficiency with a low onset potential and a low overpotential (191 mV at 10 mA cm−2), which outperforms the commercial catalyst and most reported catalysts up-to-date. Also, it shows a remarkably low Tafel slope of 44.1 mV as well as a long-time stability that the potential increased less than 10 mV after 30000 s OER at 100 mA cm−2. NiFe/NF is expected to surpass the commercial catalyst to serve as a non-noble-metal-based electrocatalyst for OER practical application. [Display omitted] •The composition of plating bath utilized in our work are FeCl2 and NiCl2, which can realize fast deposition of NiFe.•The impacts of the deposition condition, the plating bath and the Fe contents on the OER performance of NiFe alloy were discussed.•We prepared different Ni substrates and compared the ECSA of NiFe deposited onto different substrates.•NiFe/NF in our work has been confirmed to have the suprerior OER performance.