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Improving hydrogen evolution reaction efficiency through lattice tuning

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Abstract

The intermittent nature of renewable energy sources sets a requirement for efficient energy storage to mitigate the conflict between energy supply and demand. Hydrogen is a promising choice for energy storage due to its high energy density. However, the conversion of electrical energy to chemical energy stored in hydrogen through water electrolysis suffers from low efficiency, and the electricity cost dominates the total cost of hydrogen production. Here, we report the study of improving the hydrogen evolution reaction activity of Pt-based catalysts by building a nanoscale surface NiO and Pt interface, further optimizing the performance via tuning the lattice parameter of the core of nanoparticles, which can be achieved by varying the dealloying annealing time. The optimized PtCuNi-O/C and PtNi-O/C catalysts are demonstrated to be one of the best catalysts, with a mass activity (MA) of 9.1 and 8.7 mA/µgPt, which is 9.9-fold and 9.5-fold of that of Pt/C, respectively.

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Acknowledgements

Y. H., X. F. D., Q. Y. J., Z. P. Z., H. T. L., and Z. Y. L. acknowledge support from the Office of Naval Research by the grant number N000141812155 (Program officer Laura Kienker, laura.kienker@navy.mil). The imaging work at UC Irvine is supported by the National Science Foundation with grant numbers CBET 1159240, DMR-1420620, and DMR-1506535. Use of Beamline 7-BM (QAS) of the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) II was supported by the NSLS-II, Brookhaven National Laboratory, under U.S. DOE Contract No. DE-SC0012704. J. H. G. at the Advanced Light Source is supported by the DOE Office of Science under contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. We thank the support from Irvine Materials Research Institute (IMRI) at the University of California Irvine for TEM work conducted on JEOL Grand ARM. We thank the help from Dr. Shang-Hsien Hsieh for collecting some EXAFS data.

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Author notes

  1. Zipeng Zhao and Haotian Liu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, California, 90095, USA

    Zipeng Zhao, Haotian Liu, Zeyan Liu & Yu Huang

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of California, Irvine, California, 92697, USA

    Wenpei Gao & Xiaoqing Pan

  3. Materials Science and Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27695, USA

    Wenpei Gao

  4. Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, 02115, USA

    Praveen Kolla, Sanjeev Mukerjee & Qingying Jia

  5. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, California, 90095, USA

    Wang Xue & Xiangfeng Duan

  6. Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA

    Jinghua Guo

  7. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Santa Cruz, California, 95064, USA

    Jinghua Guo

  8. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, California, 92697, USA

    Xiaoqing Pan

  9. California Nanosystems Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California, 90095, USA

    Xiangfeng Duan & Yu Huang

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  1. Zipeng Zhao
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Correspondence to Yu Huang.

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Zhao, Z., Liu, H., Gao, W. et al. Improving hydrogen evolution reaction efficiency through lattice tuning. Nano Res. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-024-6579-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-024-6579-4

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