Inhibitor-regulated corrosion strategy towards synthesizing cauliflower-like amorphous RuFe-hydroxides as advanced hydrogen evolution reaction catalysts

Abstract

Producing clean hydrogen energy by water electrolysis is considered as an effective route to solve the current energy and environmental problems. Herein, a facile inhibitor-regulated corrosion strategy is employed to synthesize efficient hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) catalysts. The corrosion inhibitor of D-sodium gluconate (SG) is adopted to slow down the serious reaction of iron foam (IF) in RuCl3 aqueous solution. It is identified that the abundant hydroxy and carboxyl species of SG can compete with Cl− to adsorb on the IF surface to weaken the drastic reaction between Ru3+ and IF, resulting in achieving uniform amorphous RuFe(OH)x corrosion layers composed of nanoparticle aggregations. Owing to the sufficient exposure of active sites and electronic interaction between Ru and Fe sites, the optimized catalyst exhibits excellent HER activity of requiring a lower potential of 91 mV to reach a current density of 100 mA cm−2 and maintains durable operation at 100 mA cm−2 for 30 h without obvious fluctuations. This work supplies a facile inhibitor-regulated corrosion strategy for designing efficient catalysts for water splitting application.