Defect engineering in layered double hydroxides via surface reconstruction for enhanced oxygen evolution reaction and electrochemical dye degradation

The design of hybrid materials featuring abundant catalytically active sites, high specific surface area, and robust interfacial interactions is a highly effective approach for enhancing electrocatalytic performance. Surface reconstruction serves as fundamental mechanism in forming highly reactive phases for electrocatalysis. However, the inherent performance depends on lethargic self-reconstruction, underscoring the critical need to design precatalysts. Benefiting from the synergistic interplay between layered double hydroxide (LDH) and metal organic framework (MOF) components, we reported a surface reconstruction strategy to produce LDH/MOF hybrid with exceptional surface modification. The synthesized material was comprehensively characterized using various techniques such as PXRD, FT-IR, SEM, TEM, and XPS. This study uses AlNiZn-LDH with varying concentration of BDC to produce AlNiZn-LDH/MOF via surface modification. The optimized material demonstrating an overpotential of 230 mV at 10 mA cm−2, a Tafel slope of 70 mV.dec−1 and an impressive ECSA of 618 cm2 for OER. and simultaneously, it showed 98% degradation of cationic dye i.e. Crystal violet (Cry-V) accompanying wonderful durability. This work offers a highly effective approach for designing dual-nature catalytic material for energy conversion/storage devices and wastewater treatments.