Abstract:
Renewable energy offers the potential for a sustainable and eco-friendly energy future for the planet.
Solar, wind, hydropower, biofuels, and other renewable energy sources are the key drivers of the shift
toward green energy systems that aggregated a significant expansion in their generation capacity in
recent years. In addition, hydrogen is a versatile energy carrier and storage medium known for its high
energy density of 141.9 MJ/kg . Due to its non-polluting properties and synthesis opportunity from
earth abundance water, hydrogen became one of the most attractive sources of energy in future.
Electrochemical water splitting is the key process which encompasses the critical reaction hydrogen
evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) to produce clean hydrogen using
external energy sources. To produce hydrogen at low cost, stable and cheap electrocatalyst is needed.
To progress the advancement of highly active, efficient and low cost electrocatalyst, nickel foam is
chosen for thermal treatment varying duration as it is a promising non-noble substrate material
exhibits excellent conductivity and robust mechanical properties. It is found in this study that nickel
foam is annealed at 600° C for one hour shows overpotential of 377 mV at current density 10mA/cm2
for OER and annealed at 500° C for half an hour shows the best performance among samples for HER
with overpotential 146mV at 10 mA/cm2 under 1.0 M KOH alkaline condition, due to the resulted
combination of porous hole and nickel oxide active sites. In addition, produced electrodes show
excellent full cell performance in industrial water splitting condition in 6.0 M KOH solution with only
2.33 Vcell to achieve 500 mA/cm2 and exhibits stable long-term durability. The simplicity of synthesis
process makes it highly reproducible to overcome the challenges in hydrogen production due to high
cost noble metal catalysts, limited stability and complex synthesis process.
