Ligand Functionalized Iron-Based Metal-Organic Frameworks for Efficient Electrocatalytic Oxygen Evolution

Fe-based metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been reported as potential catalysts for electrocatalytic oxygen evolution reaction (OER). However, it is still a great challenge to rationally design robust MOF catalysts with reasonable ligands due to the lack of research on tunable structure architecture. Herein, a series of Fe-based MOFs with tunable ligands have been designed and synthesized for OER for the first time. The functionalized Fe-MOFs-NHCHO and Fe-MOFs-NO₂ derived catalysts show higher OER activity than the pristine Fe-MOFs. Remarkably, the best-performing Fe-MOFs-NHCHO shows an ultra-low overpotential of 246 mV at a current density of 10 mA cm⁻², which is 37 mV lower than Fe-MOFs. This research provides a new design concept based on MOFs materials, in the hope of finding excellent OER catalysts.