Multi-walled carbon nanotubes reinforced nickel phosphide composite: As an efficient electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction by one-step powder sintering

Abstract

Transition metal phosphides (TMPs) have been proven to be a high-performance non-noble metal electrocatalyst with high activity and nearly ~100% Faraday efficiency. However, their applications remain faces great challenging due to its unsatisfactory exposure to catalytic active sites and electronic conductivity. Here, powder sintering was used to prepare Ni–P-Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (Ni–P-MWCNTs) composite electrodes with a hierarchical flower-like structure with a large surface area, the composite electrodes were synthesized by phosphating mixed powder (porous nickel powder, red phosphorus and MWCNTs). Due to the flower-like nanoplate hierarchical structure, the fast vectorial electron transfer along the building block nanoplates was effectively induced and active sites were highly exposed. The resulting NixP-43 wt%MWCNTs shows high activity and durability towards the Hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) under acidic conditions. It demands extremely low onset-potential of 29 mV, 96 mV to achieve a current density of 10 mA cm−2. This work suggests an effective method to facilitate grain preferred orientation growth and exposure high activity active, experimental results demonstrate that the electrocatalytic performance of as-prepared Ni–P-MWCNTs were successfully optimized through the addition of MWCNTs, and might promote further study of the TMPs catalysts for HER.