Abstract
Electrocatalysts featuring robust structure, excellent catalytic activity and strong stability are highly desirable, but challenging. The rapid development of two-dimensional transition metal chalcogenide (such as WO3, MoS2 and WS2) nanostructures offers a hopeful strategy to increase the active edge sites and expedite the efficiency of electronic transport for hydrogen evolution reaction. Herein, we report a distinctive strategy to construct two-dimensional MoS2@dWO3 heterostructure nanosheets by in situ wet etching. Synthesized oxygen-incorporated MoS2-was loaded on the surface of defective WO3 square nanoframes with abundant oxygen vacancies. The resulting nanocomposite exhibits a low overpotential of 191 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and a very low Tafel slope of 42 mV dec−1 toward hydrogen evolution reaction. The long-term cyclic voltammetry cycling of 5000 cycles and more than 80,000 s chronoamperometry tests promises its outstanding stability. The intimate and large interfacial contact between MoS2 and WO3, favoring the charge transfer and electron–hole separation by the synergy of defective WO3 and oxygen-incorporated MoS2, is believed the decisive factor for improving the electrocatalytic efficiency of the nanocomposite. Moreover, the defective WO3 nanoframes with plentiful oxygen vacancies could serve as an anisotropic substrate to promote charge transport and oxygen incorporation into the interface of MoS2. This work provides a unique methodology for designing and constructing excellently heterostructure electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction.
Highlights
IntroductionElectrocatalysts water-splitting product hydrogen is reproducible and clean energy [1,2,3]
Electrocatalysts water-splitting product hydrogen is reproducible and clean energy [1,2,3].The development of platinum (Pt)-free electrocatalysts is a crucial problem to improve the generally efficiency for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), especially when facing resources shortage and energy crisis [4,5,6]
Theoretical studies have shown that along the edges of 2D MoS2 nanosheets is the source of highly HER, which plays a crucial role in constructing hybrid catalyst [15,17,18]
Summary
Electrocatalysts water-splitting product hydrogen is reproducible and clean energy [1,2,3]. The development of platinum (Pt)-free electrocatalysts is a crucial problem to improve the generally efficiency for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), especially when facing resources shortage and energy crisis [4,5,6]. MoS2 has great potential as an alternative to Pt for catalyzing overall water-splitting cost-effectively and efficiently [13,14,15,16]. The development of MoS2 based catalysts, featuring rich active edge sites [19] and accessible surface areas [20], is of vital significance to improve the overall efficiency for HER. Though many literatures have been reported the great potential of MoS2 as HER electrocatalyst [3,21,22], the severe stacking of Catalysts 2020, 10, 977; doi:10.3390/catal10090977 www.mdpi.com/journal/catalysts
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