Iron phosphide nanostructures as an efficient bifunctional catalysts for water splitting

The first part of this thesis work focuses on developing a bifunctional catalyst for electrochemical water splitting encompassing both oxygen and hydrogen evolution. A highly efficient catalyst is necessary to improve kinetics of the sluggish four electron process for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and two-electron process for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Recently, transition metal phosphides have gained increasing interest in this field because of their good electrical conductivity properties as well as better catalytic activity. Many transition-metal phosphides are being considered for this application and iron phosphide (FeP) has proved to be a good HER catalyst. In this work, we will discuss that FeP can also be used as an OER catalyst which suggest us to consider iron phosphide (FeP) as a bifunctional catalyst for electrochemical water splitting.;The second part of this thesis deals with a novel method of synthesizing transition-metal arsenides and the analysis of their properties. Synthesized transition-metal arsenides like FeAs, CoAs, MnAs, and CrAs and their superparamagnetic behavior was investigated. FeAs and CoAs obtained from this synthesis method yielded superparamagnetic nanoparticles with high blocking temperature.;Nanostructured nanomaterials are well known for their changing property as a function of reduced dimension as well as possessing high surface to volume ratio (enhanced surface area). These as-synthesized nanostructures have diverse applications in many fields.