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Vertically mounting molybdenum disulfide nanosheets on dimolybdenum carbide nanomeshes enables efficient hydrogen evolution

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Abstract

Designing hierarchical heterostructure to optimize the adsorption of hydrogen intermediate (H*) is impressive for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) catalysis. Herein, we show that vertically mounting two-dimensional (2D) layered molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) nanosheets on 2D nonlayered dimolybdenum carbide (Mo2C) nanomeshes to form a hierarchical heterostructure largely accelerates the HER kinetics in acidic electrolyte due to the weakening adsorption strength of H* on 2D Mo2C nanomeshes. Our hierarchical MoS2/Mo2C heterostructure therefore gives a decrease of overpotential for up to 500 mV at −10 mA·cm−2 and an almost 200-fold higher kinetics current density compared with the pristine Mo2C nanomeshes and maintains robust stability with a small drop of overpotential for only 16 mV upon 5,000 cycles. We further rationalize this finding by theoretical calculations and find an optimized adsorption free energy of H*, identifying that the MoS2 featuring strong H* desorption plays a key role in weakening the strong binding of Mo2C with H* and therefore improves the intrinsic HER activity on active C sites of Mo2C. This present finding shines the light on the rational design of heterostructured catalysts with synergistic geometry.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the supports from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 40120631), the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation (Nos. LQ22B060003 and LY20E020004), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Provincial Universities of Zhejiang (No. 2020YQ005), and the Research Foundation of Talented Scholars of Zhejiang A & F University (No. 2020FR069).

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Tingting Wang, Pengyan Wang, Shichun Mu & Zongkui Kou

  2. College of Chemistry and Materials Engineering, Zhejiang A&F University, Hangzhou, 311300, China

    Yajun Pang, Yitian Wu, Jin Yang & Hao Chen

  3. Jiangsu Laboratory of Advanced Functional Materials, School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Changshu Institute of Technology, Changshu, 215500, China

    Xiaorui Gao

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  1. Tingting Wang
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  5. Jin Yang
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Correspondence to Yajun Pang or Zongkui Kou.

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12274_2022_4072_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Vertically mounting molybdenum disulfide nanosheets on dimolybdenum carbide nanomeshes enables efficient hydrogen evolution

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Wang, T., Wang, P., Pang, Y. et al. Vertically mounting molybdenum disulfide nanosheets on dimolybdenum carbide nanomeshes enables efficient hydrogen evolution. Nano Res. 15, 3946–3951 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-4072-5

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