Facile Synthesis of Carbon-Sulfur Scaffold with Transition-Metal Sulfides and Oxides as Efficient Electrocatalysts for Oxygen Evolution Reaction

Transition-metal sulfides and oxides supported on carbon materials (MSOCs) are vastly explored as efficient electrocatalysts for water splitting, especially for the anodic oxygen evolution reaction (OER). In this work, we show the facile, scalable bottom-up synthesis of MSOCs using available low-cost metal salts, pyrene, and elemental sulfur as reactants. Upon condensation at high temperature, the monomers form a stable molten-state intermediate, directing the synthesis of MSOCs due to strong coordination between the metallic cation-sulfur-pyrene. These materials exhibit excellent activity towards OER achieving low overpotentials of 284 and 325 mV at 10 and 100 mA cm⁻². The effect of the carbon support is demonstrated through high mass activity of the materials (∼300 A g⁻¹) compared to the materials with no support.