Electrocatalytic overall water splitting (OWS), powered by a renewable
energy source, is a promising strategy for hydrogen production. However,
the OWS system usually requires large energy consumption due to the
sluggish kinetics of the anodic oxygen evolution reaction. Herein,
we fabricated a PtCu nanoalloy (PtCu-NA) through a template-assisted
method and evaluated its bifunctional activities for both hydrogen
evolution reaction (HER) in 1 M KOH and hydrazine oxidation reaction
(HzOR) in 1 M KOH + 1 M hydrazine. Remarkably, the interplanar crystal
spacing of PtCu-NA was larger than that of standard PtCu and closer
to that of Pt, which can be attributed to the template-assisted synthesis
method. Thus, the as-prepared PtCu-NA needs low overpotentials of
224 and 668 mV to drive HER and HzOR at 100 and 200 mA cm–2, respectively, which are much better than those of commercial Pt/C
(453 and 1081 mV). After coupling the HER and HzOR together, the overall
hydrazine splitting (OHzS) cell needs a small voltage of 0.666 V to
deliver 200 mA cm–2 in 1 M KOH + 1 M hydrazine,
outperforming the Pt/C (0.792 V). Impressively, the assembly OHzS
cell could run stably for more than 110 h. These performances can
be attributed to the regulation of the crystal structure of the PtCu
alloy and the synergistic effect between Pt and Cu.