Proceedings of nanoGe Fall Meeting 2018 (NFM18)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.nfm.2018.233
Publication date: 6th July 2018
The increasing replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energies from wind and sun requires large energy storage capabilities, because of the only intermittent availability of these sources. Such big capacities can only be provided by the storage in chemical bonds, the simplest being the hydrogen molecule formed by direct electrochemical water splitting. For this purpose, expensive and rare electrocatalysts made from Platinum series metals will have to be replaced by cheaper, more abundant and hazard-free materials. Nickel metal and its oxides are known since many years for their good activity for water splitting.
In our studies Nickeloxide nanoparticles and thin films are prepared by electrochemical deposition as well as by magnetron sputtering. The composition is optimised towards the achievement of an optimum activity for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) as well as the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). In order to gain a deeper understanding of the critical parameters for the catalytic activity during the electrochemical reaction, we investigate the chemical composition by XPS and SEM before and after electrochemical testing as well as by in-operando Raman-spectroscopy. The achieved activities are comparable to Platinum for the HER and to RuO2 for the OER. They depend strongly on the chemical composition of the catalyst, which in turn is heavily influenced by the chosen preparation method. Furthermore, we investigate the stability of our catalysts in relation to their activity and composition. The highly active Nickel (oxide/hydroxide) mixture for the HER degrades over time by the complete transformation to the less active pure Nickel-dihydroxide compound. For the OER the pre-treatment of the Nickel compound is of extreme importance in order to form a large amount of the catalytically active NiO(OH) species on the surface during the electrochemical reaction. These nanoparticles show a nearly constant activity for a testing period of 26 hours at a current density of 10 mA/cm2.
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