Uniformly bimetal-decorated holey carbon nanorods derived from metal−organic framework for efficient hydrogen evolution

Abstract

The hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) as a fundamental process in electrocatalysis plays a significant role in clean energy technologies. For an energy-efficient HER, it demands an effective, durable, and low-cost catalyst to trigger proton reduction with minimal overpotential and fast kinetics. Here, we successfully fabricate a highly efficient HER catalyst of N-C/Co/Mo2C holey nanorods with Co/β-Mo2C nanoparticles uniformly embedded in nitrogen-doped carbon (N-C/Co/Mo2C) by pyrolyzing the molybdate-coordinated zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF-67/MoO42−) holey nanorods, which result from the reaction between CoMoO4 and MeIM in a methanol/water/triethylamine mixed solution. The uniform distribution of MoO42− in the ZIF-67/MoO42− enables Co/β-Mo2C nanoparticles to be well-distributed within nitrogen-doped carbon holey nanorods. This synthetic strategy endows the N-C/Co/Mo2C catalyst with uniformly decorated bimetal, thus attaining excellent HER electrocatalytic activities with a small overpotential of 142.0 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and superior stability in 1.0 mol L−1 KOH aqueous solution.