Co2FeO4@rGO composite: Towards trifunctional water splitting in alkaline media

Development of efficient, low cost and multifunctional electrocatalysts for water splitting to harvest hydrogen fuels is a challenging task, but the combination of carbon materials with transition metal-based compounds is providing a unique and attractive strategy. Herein, composite systems based on cobalt ferrite oxide-reduced graphene oxide (Co2FeO4) @(rGO) using simultaneous hydrothermal and chemical reduction methods have been prepared. The proposed study eliminates one step associated with the conversion of GO into rGO as it uses direct GO during the synthesis of cobalt ferrite oxide, consequently rGO based hybrid system is achieved in-situ significantly, the optimized Co2FeO4@rGO composite has revealed an outstanding multifunctional applications related to both oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen counterpart (HER). Various metal oxidation states and oxygen vacancies at the surface of Co2FeO4@rGO composites guided the multifunctional surface properties. The optimized Co2FeO4@rGO composite presents excellent multifunctional properties with onset potential of 0.60 V for ORR, an overpotential of 240 mV at a 20 mAcm−2 for OER and 320 mV at a 10 mAcm−2 for HER respectively. Results revealed that these multifunctional properties of the optimized Co2FeO4@ rGO composite are associated with high electrical conductivity, high density of active sites, crystal defects, oxygen vacancies, and favorable electronic structure arisinng from the substitution of Fe for Co atoms in binary spinel oxide phase. These surface features synergistically uplifted the electrocatalytic properties of Co2FeO4@rGO composites. The multifunctional properties of the Co2FeO4@ rGO composite could be of high interest for its use in a wide range of applications in sustainable and renewable energy fields.