Synergistic role of Bi-functional NiS2/MoS2 dandelion flowers for electrochemical performance towards clean energy H2 production

Abstract

MoS2 and NiS2 are promising materials that have been extensively used for efficiently facilitating energy storage and hydrogen production owing to the existence of rich active sites. To cope with the worldwide energy crises, target oriented NiS2/MoS2 dandelion flowers like composites have been developed and their synergistic effect has been studied for their potential utilization energy applications. NiS2/MoS2 dandelion having emerging nanowires (d=20 nm) played synergistic role and exhibited enhanced specific capacitance (711 F/g) as equated to individual MoS2 (481 F/g) and NiS2 (620 F/g). This improvement is credited to the numerous active sites generation, rapid ions transfer and powerful synergistic impact caused by NiS2/MoS2 composite. More than 91 % of capacitance has been observed for NiS2/MoS2 composites after 4000 cycles, demonstrating their exceptional stability owing to the uniform growth. Along with higher specific capacitance, considerably higher H2 production rate (8 µmol h−1g−1) for NiS2/MoS2 composites have also been observed. Correlation between recombination rate and optical characteristics have been well-explained by photoluminescence. Thus bi-functional NiS2/MoS2 composite material has prospective applications in H2 production and energy storage devices.