Electronic Structure Engineering of NiCoP Sites via N, Ru Dual Doping for Bifunctional Water Electrolysis.

Exploiting highly effective electrocatalysts is a challenge for boosting the overall efficiency of water splitting. Herein, we present a nitrogen and ruthenium dual-doping strategy to tailor the electronic structures of NiCoP(N, Ru-NiCoP), creating high-performance bifunctional electrodes for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The dual-doping approach is favorable for electronic interactions within the NiCoP and CoP, yielding a near-zero Gibbs free energy for H adsorption. Consequently, the optimized N, Ru-NiCoP electrodes exhibit exceptional bifunctional activities, with overpotentials of 53 and 405 mV at 100 mA cm for the HER and OER, respectively. Notably, their performance surpasses that of commercial Pt/C and RuO catalysts at large current densities, demonstrating their potential for industrial water splitting applications. Moreover, the overall water-splitting device achieves a current density of 10 mA cm with a driving voltage of only 1.54 V. This work provides an effective heteroatom doping strategy to develop low-cost and highly active electrocatalysts.