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Abstract Designing affordable and efficient bifunctional electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) has remained a long‐lasting target for the progressing hydrogen economy. Utilization of metal/semiconductor interface effect has been lately established as a viable implementation to realize the favorable electrocatalytic performance due to the built‐in electric field. Herein, a typical Mott–Schottky electrocatalyst by immobilizing Ni/CeO 2 hetero‐nanoparticles onto N‐doped carbon nanofibers (abbreviated as Ni/CeO 2 @N‐CNFs hereafter) has been developed via a feasible electrospinning‐carbonization tactic. Experimental findings and theoretic calculations substantiate that the elaborated constructed Ni/CeO 2 heterojunction effectively triggers the self‐driven charge transfer on heterointerfaces, leading to the promoted charge transfer rate, the optimized chemisorption energies for reaction intermediates and ultimately the expedited reaction kinetics. Therefore, the well‐designed Ni/CeO 2 @N‐CNFs deliver superior HER and OER catalytic activities with overpotentials of 100 and 230 mV at 10 mA cm ‐2 , respectively, in alkaline solution. Furthermore, the Ni/CeO 2 @N‐CNFs‐equipped electrolyzer also exhibits a low cell voltage of 1.56 V to attain 10 mA cm ‐2 and impressive long‐term durability over 55 h. The innovative manipulation of electronic modulation via Mott–Schottky establishment may inspire the future development of economical electrocatalysts for diverse sustainable energy systems.
Li et al. (Sat,) studied this question.