Electronic transfer enhanced coral-like CoxP loaded Ru nanoclusters as efficient catalyst for hydrogen generation via NaBH4 hydrolysis

Abstract

The slow kinetics of NaBH4 hydrolysis to generate hydrogen can be effectively improved by designing the composite catalysts of precious metals and transition metals, while their micro-combined structure still needs to be improved. Herein, the coral-like CoxP with high specific surface area is fabricated by ZIF-67 in-situ etching, annealing, phosphating and loading in turns, 1.5 nm Ru nanocluster species are uniformly loaded on the skeleton surface of CoxP, and there is the strong electronic effect between Ru and CoxP. By further adjusting the loading of Ru, the optimized Ru3.4@CoxP catalyst has lower activation energy (32.8 kJ mol−1) than CoxP, and displays higher turnover frequency (606molH2min−1molRu−1) and hydrogen generation rate (4551mLmin−1gcatalyst−1) than the comparative and most reported similar catalysts during NaBH4 hydrolysis. Furthermore, After five cycles, the catalytic activity of Ru3.4@CoxP is only reduced by 25.6%. The excellent catalytic activity is due to the micro-nano structure with high specific surface area and the synergistic effect between Ru and Co species providing more catalytic active sites, which is the precise and controllable design method for developing noble metal/transition metal composite catalyst.