Layered
double hydroxides (LDHs), as an effective oxygen evolution
reaction (OER) electrocatalyst, face many challenges in practical
applications. The main obstacle is that bulk materials limit the exposure
of active sites. At the same time, the poor conductivity of LDHs is
also an important factor. Exfoliation is one of the most direct and
effective strategies to increase the electrocatalytic properties of
LDHs, leading to exposure of many active sites. However, developing
an efficient exfoliation strategy to exfoliate LDHs into stable monolayer
nanosheets is still challenging. Therefore, we report a new and efficient
solid-phase exfoliation strategy to exfoliate NiFe LDH and graphene
oxide (GO) into monolayer nanosheets and the exfoliating ratios of
NiFe LDH and GO can reach up to 10 and 5 wt %, respectively. Based
on the solid-phase exfoliation strategy, we accidentally discovered
that there is a dynamic evolution process between NiFe-LDH nanosheets
(NiFe-LDH-NS) and GO nanosheets (GO-NS) to assemble new NiFe-LDH/GO
nanohybrids, i.e., NiFe-LDH-NS could be horizontal bespreading on
GO-NS or well-organized standing on GO-NS, or both simultaneously.
The electrocatalytic OER property test results show that NiFe-LDH/RGO-3
(NFRG-3) nanohybrids obtained by the reduction treatment of NiFe-LDH/GO-3
(NFGO-3) nanohybrids, in which NiFe-LDH-NS are well-organized standing
on GO-NS, have excellent electrocatalytic properties for OER in an
alkaline solution (with a small overpotential of 273 mV and a Tafel
slope of 49 mV dec–1 at the current density of 30
mA cm–2). The excellent electrocatalytic properties
for OER of NFRG-3 nanohybrids could be attributed to the unique three-dimensional
arraylike structure with many active sites. At the same time, reduced
graphene oxide (RGO) with excellent conductivity can improve the charge-transfer
efficiency and synergistically improve OER properties of nanohybrids.
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