The lack of highly efficient, inexpensive catalysts severely hinders large-scale application of electrochemical hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) for producing hydrogen. MoS2 as a low-cost candidate suffers from low catalytic performance.
Taking advantage of its tri-layer structure, research teams led by Prof. DENG De and Prof. ZHOU Wu at Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of Chinese Academy of Sciences and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences reported a MoS2 nanofoam catalyst co-confining selenium in surface and cobalt in inner layer, exhibiting an ultra-high large-current-density HER activity surpassing all previously reported heteroatom-doped MoS2. At a large current density of 1000 mA cm−2, a much lower overpotential of 382 mV than that of 671 mV over commercial Pt/C catalyst is achieved and stably maintained for 360 hours without decay. First-principles calculations demonstrate that inner layer-confined cobalt atoms stimulate neighbouring sulfur atoms while surface-confined selenium atoms stabilize the structure, which cooperatively enable the massive generation of both in-plane and edge active sites with optimized hydrogen adsorption activity. This strategy provides a viable route for developing MoS2-based catalysts for industrial HER applications.
This work was published in Nature Communications recently. The work is supported from the National Key R&D Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the DNL Cooperation Fund, CAS, and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Undergraduate student GAO Meng at University of Chinese Academy of Sciences performed the atomic-resolution HAADF-STEM measurements.
