Reparation of porous Ti-Cu alloy by one-step sintering method and application of hydrogen evolution reaction

Abstract

• The porous Ti-Cu alloy catalyst was synthesized by the one-step sintering method. • The introduction of Mo metal significantly improves the HER performance. • The first-principles approach gives the experiment a detailed interpretation of the atomic orbital hierarchy. In this paper, Ti-Cu porous alloy electrocatalysts were synthesized by simple mechanical alloying combined with a one-step sintering method, and the positive effects of milling time, sintering temperature, and sintering time on HER were explored. The results show that the Ti 2 Cu 3 porous alloy catalyst after ball milling has excellent electrocatalytic activity. After the introduction of transition metal Mo, the overpotential of ball-milled Mo-Ti 2 Cu 3 -600 electrocatalyst is 133 mV, and the corresponding Tafel slope is 97.37 mV·dec −1 , second only to commercial Pt/C catalyst. At the same time, the first principle was used to reveal the interaction of electrons in catalysis. The effective mass of the ternary alloy containing Mo is 0.19 m 0 , and the original alloy catalyst is 0.28 m 0 . It can be found that the introduction of Mo atoms improves the carrier migration efficiency, which has a high promotion effect on the catalytic performance of the original alloy. The reaction energy barrier is also reduced from 0.584 eV to 0.051 eV, which greatly improves the reaction process. Such a simple one-step sintering method can also obtain excellent electrocatalysts, which provides a new design idea for short-process processing of excellent electrocatalysts and has broad application prospects.