With the growing demand for low carbon emission reduction, hydrogen energy is widely valued, and hydrogen production by electrolysis of water using renewable energy sources is currently the process with lower carbon emissions among many hydrogen source options. Electrolytic water technology mainly consists of cathodic hydrogen precipitation reaction (HER) and anodic oxygen precipitation reaction (OER). Seawater accounts for 96.5% of the Earth's water resources, and electrolysis of seawater for hydrogen will significantly reduce the cost of conventional electrolytic water. However, the main bottleneck of seawater electrolysis is that the abundant chloride ions in seawater will deposit on the cathode surface and inhibit hydrogen production.

In order to develop seawater electrolysis technology, it is necessary to develop low-cost, highly active and chlorine-resistant electrocatalysts. Transition metal phosphides show potential applications in saltwater electrolysis due to their good resistance to chloride corrosion and abundant active sites in electrolytic water, and bimetallic phosphides help to further improve their catalytic activity due to the synergistic and electronic coupling mechanisms between different metal atoms. The catalytic performance can be further enhanced by constructing heterogeneous interfaces, but the precise synthesis of bimetallic phosphides rich in interfacial sites and their realization for brine electrolysis remains a great challenge.

In view of this, Associate Professors Jian Zhang and Deli Wang and their team at Huazhong University of Science and Technology constructed heterogeneous bimetallic Ni2P-FeP/foam iron phosphides by in situ etching and phosphorylation. The coexistence of metal and P sites helps to modulate the interfacial electronic structure, thus improving HER electrocatalytic activity in alkaline electrolytes and alkaline brine electrolytes, and can be used as cathode catalysts for high-performance electrolysis of brine. This work provides high-performance electrocatalysts for low-cost alkaline brine electrolysis against chlorine corrosion and provides new ideas for the design of heterogeneous bimetallic phosphides. The results were published online in Nano Research.

Nano Research was founded in July 2008 and is co-sponsored by Tsinghua University and the Chinese Chemical Society, mainly publishing world-class original scientific papers and review papers in the field of nano research. It is dedicated to building an international first-class journal network dissemination system, creating a platform to show the development level and academic characteristics of Chinese nano research to the world, promoting academic exchanges between Chinese and foreign nano disciplines, and providing a channel for Chinese nano field workers to improve their international influence. The journal was indexed by SCI-E in January 2010, and after more than 10 years of development, it has become one of the most influential academic journals in the global nano field, with an all-time high impact factor of 10.269 in 2021, and continues to be in the Q1 region in the four disciplinary classifications. The journal has won many national and provincial awards such as China Publishing Government Award Journal Award, China Top 100 Science and Technology Journals, and China University Excellence Science and Technology Journal Award.

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