TpyCo2+‐Based Coordination Polymers by Water‐Induced Gelling Trigged Efficient Oxygen Evolution Reaction.

Though the use of conventional self‐assembled architectures in functional applications involving advanced energy chemistries is an important research area, it remains largely unexplored. The self‐assembly of the threefold and sixfold‐symmetric terpyridines (tpy) with Co(II) salts results in a novel morphological and structural characteristics, regardless of the nature of the self‐assembled fragments. Herein, such metallopolymers are achieved by one‐pot synthesis in CH3OH/CHCl3 (v/v = 5:1) mixture ambient. It is found, for the first time, that Co‐containing polymers can be well dispersed in deionized water to form gel‐like self‐assemblies that consist of a highly interconnected 3D network and exhibit enhanced electrical conductivity and thus are attractive as electrocatalysts. As expected, the optimized Co‐based polymeric structures exhibit a low overpotential of 320 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and high stability over 2000 cycles toward oxygen evolution reaction (OER), surpassing commercial RuO2/C, single‐site Co catalysts, polymer, and metal–organic framework‐based OER catalysts reported to date. X‐ray absorption spectroscopy and density functional theory calculations reveal that the tpy‐Co2+ (3N‐Co or tpy‐Co2+) configurations act as highly active sites. Importantly, this work demonstrates the functional application of the self‐assembled metallopolymers as electrocatalysts for energy conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]