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Interfacial engineering of heterostructured carbon-supported molybdenum cobalt sulfides for efficient overall water splitting

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Abstract

Constructing hetero-structured catalyst is promising but still challenging to achieve overall water splitting for hydrogen production with high efficiency. Herein, we developed a sulfide-based MoS2/Co1−xS@C hetero-structure for highly efficient electrochemical hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The carbon derived from the filter paper acts as a conducting carrier to ensure adequate exposure of the active sites guaranteed with improved catalytic stability. The unique hierarchical nano-sheets facilitate the charge and ion transfer by shortening the diffusion path during electro-catalysis. Meanwhile, the robust hetero-interfaces in MoS2/Co1−xS@C can expose rich electrochemical active sites and facilitate the charge transfer, which further cooperates synergistically toward electro-catalytic reactions. Consequently, the optimal MoS2/Co1−xS@C hetero-structures present small over-potentials toward HER (135 mV @ 10 mA·cm−2) and OER (230 mV @ 10 mA·cm−2). The MoS2/Co1−xS@C electrolyzer requires an ultralow voltage of 1.6 V at the current density of 10 mA·cm−2 with excellent durability, outperforming the state-of-the-art electro-catalysts. This work sheds light on the design of the hetero-structured catalysts with interfacial engineering toward large-scale water splitting.

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Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51871119, 22075141, and 22101132), Scientific and Technological Innovation Special Fund for Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutrality of Jiangsu Province (BK20220039), Jiangsu Provincial Founds for Natural Science Foundation (BK20180015 and BK20210311), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021M691561 and 2021T140319), Jiangsu Postdoctoral Research Fund (2021K547C) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (kfjj20180605).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Materials Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210016, China

    Ming-Yue Ma, Han-Zhi Yu, Li-Ming Deng, Lu-Qi Wang, Shu-Yi Liu, Feng Hu & Sheng-Jie Peng

  2. Institute of Applied Physics and Materials Engineering, University of Macau, Macao SAR, 519000, China

    Hui Pan

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering Science, University of Johannesburg, Cnr Kingsway and University Roads, Auckland Park, Johannesburg, 2092, South Africa

    Jian-Wei Ren

  4. Peter the Great Saint-Petersburg Polytechnic University, 195251, Saint Petersburg, Russia

    Maxim Yu. Maximov

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  1. Ming-Yue Ma
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Ma, MY., Yu, HZ., Deng, LM. et al. Interfacial engineering of heterostructured carbon-supported molybdenum cobalt sulfides for efficient overall water splitting. Tungsten 5, 589–597 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42864-023-00212-6

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