Amorphous Ni-P nanoparticles anchoring on nickel foam as an efficient integrated anode for glucose sensing and oxygen evolution

Ever-growing efforts have been devoted to developing cost-effective and earth-abundant electrocatalysts with high-performance in biosensing and energy energy conversion. In this work, amorphous nickel-phosphorus (Ni-P) nanoparticles anchoring on Ni foam (Ni-P/NF) were prepared through a facile electroless deposition approach. The morphology and composition were characterized by scanning electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. As an integrated anode, Ni-P/NF exhibits high performance towards glucose electrochemical sensing, with a high sensitivity of 13.89 mA mM⁻¹ cm⁻², a low detection limit of 1 µM, a wide detection ranges from 2 µM to 0.54 mM, and a quick response (<10 s), as well as good selectivity and reliability for real sample analysis in human serum. In addition to electrocatalytic glucose oxidation, Ni-P/NF shows remarkable catalytic activity towards oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in alkaline solution and it only needs an overpotential of 360 mV to afford 50 mA cm⁻². Moreover, Ni-P/NF shows excellent durability under alkaline OER condition. All these results demonstrate Ni-P/NF as highly efficient integrated anode in both biosensing and energy conversion. (paper)