Corrosion-engineered bimetallic oxide electrode as anode for high-efficiency anion exchange membrane water electrolyzer

•A small densely packed Ni0.75Fe2.25O4 nanoparticles were grown on the Ni foam.•The binary Ni0.75Fe2.25O4 nanoparticles exhibited excellent OER activity.•The improved activation sites due to their nanostructures enhanced OER activity.•The electrode applied to high-efficiency AEM water electrolyzer as an anode. Developing high-performance and low-cost oxygen-evolving electrodes is one of major challenges in electrochemical water splitting technology. We demonstrated that the aqueous-phase corrosion of a conventional Ni foam in the presence of exotic Fe3+ cations can directly transform it into an electrode with high catalytic activity and stability for oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The surface of the corroded electrode consisted of densely packed, small Ni0.75Fe2.25O4 nanoparticles with sizes less than 5 nm. This electrode required an overpotential of only 192 mV to reach an OER current density of 10 mA/cm2 in 1 M KOH, outperforming the state-of-the-art IrO2 catalyst by 73 mV. Density functional theory calculations revealed that the unique surface structure and iron composition of Ni0.75Fe2.25O4 nanoparticles play a key role in achieving an improved OER activity. When coupled with a Pt/C hydrogen-evolving catalyst, the resulting anion-exchange membrane (AEM) water electrolyzer achieved an overall water-splitting current density as high as 2.0 A/cm2 at a cell voltage of 1.9 V in 1 M KOH, which was 1.7 times that obtained from the IrO2 and Pt/C catalyst pair and also much greater than reported values from other AEM water electrolyzers. By revisiting and exploiting a traditional corrosion process, our work opens a simple, cost-effective, and scalable route to a high-performance OER electrode for efficient AEM water electrolysis.