One-pot synthesis of holey MoS2 nanostructures as efficient electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution

Abstract

In this work, highly porous MoS2 nanostructures have been synthesized via a one-pot and versatile calcination of cyanamide and (NH4)2MoS4 precursors. At first, the thermal polymerization of cyanamide into carbon nitride suppresses the aggregation of MoS2. Then, the thermal decomposition of the formed carbon nitride brings about plentiful pores with a size of 4–70nm in MoS2 nanostructures, generating an extremely large specific surface area up to 311m2g−1. Due to the high specific surface area and abundant exposed edge sites, the resultant porous MoS2 (p-MoS2) nanostructures exhibited outstanding electrochemical hydrogen evolution (HER) activity in a 0.5M H2SO4 aqueous solution. The onset overpotential and the overpotential at a current density of 10mA/cm2 were as low as ∼30mV and ∼130mV, respectively, which is superior to the previously-reported MoS2-based HER electrocatalysts.