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The direct urea fuel cell (DUFC), as an efficient technology for generating power from urea, shows great potential for energy-sustainable development but is greatly hindered by the slow kinetics of the urea oxidation reaction (UOR). Herein, we highlighted a defect engineering strategy to design oxygen vacancy-rich NiMoO 4 nanosheets as a promising platform to study the relationship between O vacancies and UOR activity. Experimental/theoretical results confirm that the rich O vacancies confined in NiMoO 4 nanosheets successfully bring synergetic effects of higher exposed active sites, faster electron transport, and lower adsorption energy of urea molecules, giving rise to largely improved UOR activity. As expected, the r-NiMoO 4 /NF 3D electrode exhibits a higher current density of 249.5 mA cm –2, which is about 1.9 and 5.0 times larger than those of p-NiMoO 4 /NF and Ni-Mo precursor/NF at a potential of 0.6 V. Our finding will be a promising pathway to develop non-noble materials as highly efficient UOR catalysts.
Tong et al. (Tue,) studied this question.