Evolution of novel nanostructured MoCoFe-based hydroxides composites toward high-performance electrochemical applications: Overall water splitting and supercapacitor

Metal hydroxides are versatile and appealing electrode materials owing to their merits such as easy room-temperature synthesis, nanostructures formation, higher conductivity, crystallite or non-crystallite formation, porous structures, etc. Herein, nanostructured ternary transition metal (M = Mo, Co, Fe) hydroxides (TTMHs) are successfully grown on nickel foams via template-free single-step electrodeposition for overall water splitting and supercapacitor applications. Interestingly, numerous element ratios of Mo⁵⁺, Co²⁺, and Fe³⁺ in the electrodeposition precursor solutions manifested novel nanostructures viz nanosheets, nanoflakes, nanoparticles, and nanograss-like structures were evolved for different precursor solutions. For water splitting, a negative electrode prepared using aqueous Mo:Co:Fe (4.0:4.0:2.0 M ratio) metal salt solution that exhibited excellent hydrogen evolution activity with 98 mV overpotential, whereas a positive electrode (Mo:Co:Fe = 3.0:3.5:3.5) shows efficient oxygen evolution with 227 mV overpotential, and a full cell assembled from these active electrodes exhibited lower 1.56 V cell voltage at 10 mAcm⁻². For the supercapacitor, a working electrode with composition Mo:Co:Fe = 6.0:2.0:2.0 showed 3354.7 mFcm⁻² high areal capacitance at 1.0 mAcm⁻² with excellent retention (91% after 3000 cycles). An asymmetric supercapacitor (ASC) device was fabricated that exhibited enormous energy and power densities of 1.27 × 10⁻³ Whcm⁻³ and 3.75 Wcm⁻³, respectively. The high-performances of both devices (water splitting full cell and supercapacitor) are due to the unique composition of hybrid electrodes (with nanostructured morphology) and synergistic effects. The present investigation demonstrates a simple strategy for preparing potential TTMHs composite electrodes with the evolution of different morphologies for multiple electrochemical applications.