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Interfacial engineering of Ni/V2O3 for hydrogen evolution reaction

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Abstract

Electrocatalytic water splitting offers a sustainable route for hydrogen production, enabling the clean and renewable alternative energy system of hydrogen economy. The scarcity and high-cost of platinum-group-metal (PGM) materials urge the exploration of high-performance non-PGM electrocatalysts. Herein, a unique hierarchical structure of Ni/V2O3 with extraordinary electrocatalytic performance (e.g., overpotentials as low as 22 mV at 20 mA·cm−2 and 94 mV at 100 mA·cm−2) toward hydrogen evolution reaction in alkaline electrolyte (1 M KOH) is reported. The investigation on the hierarchical Ni/V2O3 with a bimodal size-distribution also offers insight of interfacial engineering that only proper Ni/V2O3 interface can effectively improve H2O adsorption, H2O dissociation as well as H adsorption, for an efficient hydrogen production.

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Acknowledgements

The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 11874005, 21701153, 51601030 and 21773023).

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  1. Yang Chen and Yuan Rao contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, China

    Yang Chen, Yuan Rao, Rongzhi Wang, Yanan Yu, Qin Yue, Yanning Zhang & Yijin Kang

  2. Key Laboratory of Luminescent and Real-Time Analytical Chemistry, Ministry of Education, Institute for Clean Energy and Advanced Materials, Faculty of Materials and Energy, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China

    Qiulin Li, Shujuan Bao & Maowen Xu

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  1. Yang Chen
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Correspondence to Yanning Zhang or Yijin Kang.

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Chen, Y., Rao, Y., Wang, R. et al. Interfacial engineering of Ni/V2O3 for hydrogen evolution reaction. Nano Res. 13, 2407–2412 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2865-y

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