Sustainable energy conversion and storage provide feasible approaches towards green energy solutions and carbon neutralization.The high cost and complex fabrication process of advanced energy nanoma-terials,however,has impeded the practical application of emerging sustainable technologies.The direct use of earth-abundant natural minerals which contain active elements for effective catalysis and energy storage should be a promising approach to achieve affordable sustainable energy supply and green fuel generations.Herein,as typical examples of activating natural minerals for electrocatalysis,two common minerals,pyrite and chalcopyrite,are activated via a one-step phase transformation strategy.Through a facile thermal reduction process,the minerals are completely transformed into active pyrrhotite(FeS)and haycockite(Cu4Fe5S8)phases.The thermal reduction resulting phase transformation can lead to sig-nificant surface disordering and can contribute to the catalytic activity by offering favourable electronic structure for intermediates adsorption,abundant surficial active centres,and substantial surface redox pairs.The activated minerals are examined for hydrogen evolution reaction(HER)and oxygen evolution reaction(OER)catalysis.The obtained haycockite phase delivers the best performance towards acidic HER and alkaline OER.Further phase optimization is performed via loading a low percentage of iridium nan-oclusters on the haycockite phase deposited onto a carbon cloth substrate,through which an overpoten-tial as low as 310 mV for achieving 10 mA cm-2 and a small Tafel slope of 55.6 mV dec-1 are recorded for alkaline OER.This work demonstrates the feasibility of the direct use of cost-effective natural resources for addressing the current energy-related issues and paves a way to reach affordable practical emerging sustainable technologies.

Jun Mei;Qian Zhang;Hong Peng;Ting Liao;Ziqi Sun

Centre for Materials Science,Queensland University of Technology,2 George Street,Brisbane,QLD 4000,Australia;School of Chemistry and Physics,Queensland University of Technology,2 George Street,Brisbane,QLD 4000,Australia;College of Materials Science and Engineering,Taiyuan University of Technology,Taiyuan 030024,China;School of Chemical Engineering,The University of Queensland,Brisbane,QLD 4072,Australia;School of Mechanical Medical and Process Engineering,Queensland University of Technology,2 George Street,Brisbane,QLD 4000,Australia

材料科学技术（英文版）

[1]Jun Mei;Qian Zhang;Hong Peng;Ting Liao;Ziqi Sun-.Phase engineering activation of low-cost iron-containing sulfide minerals for advanced electrocatalysis)[J].材料科学技术（英文版）,2022(16):181-188

haycockite,Cu4Fe5S8,overpoten

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