Switching Urea Oxidation Reaction Pathways by Regulating Multi-Component Sites on Chlorine-Doped Nickel-Cobalt Hydroxides.

Authors

Yuan Rui, Yunxia Liu, Fuqi Zheng, Miaohui Wang, Zong Li, Haiping Lin, Yongquan Qu, Peipei Huang, Qing Li

Published in

Small (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany). Pages e74807. Jul 27, 2026. Epub Jul 27, 2026.

Abstract

Urea oxidation reaction (UOR) has been considered as a promising alternative to the oxygen evolution reaction for hydrogen production. So far, there are two proposed catalytic reaction alternatives for UOR, including a conventional direct six-electron process and a rarely reported two-stage reaction pathway. Herein, we successfully achieved the switching of UOR pathways by artificially increasing/decreasing the concentration of oxygen vacancies monotonously on nickel-cobalt hydroxides. The "multi-component active sites" and the UOR structural-pathway relation were clearly elucidated by extensive experimental characterizations and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. With rich "multi-component active sites", chlorine-substituted nickel-cobalt hydroxides (NiCoClOH) exhibit a record performance for Ni³⁺-active sites (1.22/1.34 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode to achieve 10/100 mA cm^-2 in 1 M KOH with 0.33  M urea). This work not only reported highly efficient electrocatalysts for UOR, but also paved new insights for the structure-pathway relationship during UOR.

PMID:
42504561
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 27 Jul 2026.

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