Abstracts Book - IMRC 2018

• SC2-P013
ELECTRODEPOSITION OF A COBALT-PHOSPHATE COMPLEX
CATALYST (CoPi) IN PRESENCE OF AN ORGANIC COMPLEXING
AGENT
Xochitl Andrea Hernandez Contreras 1 , Jose Luis Casas Espinola 2 , Inti Zumeta Dubé 1 , Edilso
Reguera 3 , Selene Haydee Martinez Salas 4
1
Instituto Politécnico Nacional - IPN, UPIITA, Mexico. 2 Instituto Politécnico Nacional - IPN, ESFM,
Mexico. 3 Centro de Investigación en Ciencia Aplicada y Tecnología Avanzada, Legaría, IPN, SEPI,
Mexico. 4 Centro de Investigación en Ciencia Aplicada y Tecnología Avanzada, Legaría, IPN, ,
Mexico.
It is known that CoPi layers, a promising cobalt-phosphate complex, has not
reached its optimal thickness for water oxidation. That is because of cobalt ions
solubility limitations in the precursor solution used in the conventional
electrodeposition technique. It has already been studied that cobalt salts
concentrations above 5mM in the precursor solution of CoPi produce a
precipitate which has not been studied in detail, but it has a strong influence on
the decrease of available active species in solution that are needed to achieve
the electrodeposition of the desire material, therefore limiting its thickness. That
is in accordance with the reported mechanism of deposition. So that, up to now,
the thicker the CoPi layer the higher the activity for water oxidation for the range
of explored thickness (1-4 µm).
In this work we study for the first time the use of a chemical complexing agent,
at different concentrations, to improve the solubility of cobalt salts in the
precursor solution and avoid the resulting precipitate at concentrations higher
than 5 mM. It was observed that the presence of a chemical complexing agent
not only overcome the problem of solubility limitation of cobalt salts, but makes
possible an increase in the thickness of the deposited layers. The structural
characterization of the films was carried out by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and
Raman spectroscopy, this gave us the possibility to know the influence of the
new chemical complex on the structure of the catalyst as well as the morphology
of the material which was obtained by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). Our
research is in progress to evaluate the water oxidation activity dependence on
thickness of CoPi layers above 4 µm.
Keywords: chemical complexing agents, cobalt-phosphate complex, catalyst
Presenting authors email: andreahdez_iq@hotmail.com