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Reduced water dissociation barrier on constructing Pt-Co/CoOx interface for alkaline hydrogen evolution

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Abstract

Water dissociation process is generally regarded as the rate-limiting step for alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), and severely inhibits the catalytic efficiency of Pt based catalysts. To overcome this problem, the in-situ constructed interfaces of Pt-Co alloy and amorphous cobalt oxide (CoOx) on the carbon powder are designed. The amorphous CoOx at Pt-Co/CoOx interfaces not only provide active sites for water dissociation to facilitate Volmer step, but also produce the strong electronic transfer with Pt-Co. Accordingly, the obtained interfacial catalysts exhibit outstanding alkaline HER performance with a Tafel slope of 29.3 mV·dec−1 and an ultralow overpotential of only 28 mV at 10 mA·cm−2. Density functional theory (DFT) reveals that the electronic accumulation on the interfacial Co atom in Pt-Co/CoOx constructing the novel active site for water dissociation. Compared to the Pt-Co, all of the energy barriers for water adsorption, water dissociation and hydrogen adsorption/desorption are reduced in Pt-Co/CoOx interfaces, suggesting a boosted HER kinetics for alkaline HER.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21875039), the Project on the Integration of Industry-Education-Research of Fujian Province (No. 2021H6020), and Fujian province’s high level innovative and entrepreneurial talents (No. 50012709).

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  1. College of Materials Science and Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, 350108, China

    Yandong Wang, Wei Wu, Runzhe Chen, Caoxin Lin & Niancai Cheng

  2. State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, China

    Shichun Mu

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  1. Yandong Wang
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Wang, Y., Wu, W., Chen, R. et al. Reduced water dissociation barrier on constructing Pt-Co/CoOx interface for alkaline hydrogen evolution. Nano Res. 15, 4958–4964 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-4128-6

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