Crystalline/amorphous Ni/NiO core/shell nanosheets as highly active electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction

Significance Statement

Hydrogen is expected to play an important role as a clean and renewable energy carrier in the future energy economy.[1−3] Production of large quantities of hydrogen with economically viable methods is needed to achieve that goal. Advanced water-splitting techniques are very attractive especially when using electricity generated from green energy sources, such as solar and wind.[4] Although the most efficient electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is platinum,[3,5−7] its scarcity and high cost hamper its large-scale application.[3] Therefore, it is imperative to develop earth-abundant and low-cost hydrogen evolution reaction electrocatalysts as alternatives.

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[2] S. A. Wells, A. Sartbaeva, V. L. Kuznetsov, P. P. Edwards, Encyclopedia of Inorganic and Bioinorganic Chemistry Wiley-VCH, 2011.

[3] S. Shima, O. Pilak, S. Vogt, M. Schick, M. S Stagni, W. Meyer-Klaucke, E. Warkentin, R. K. Thauer, U. Ermler, Science 321 (2008) 572−575.

[4] L. Schlapbach, Nature 460 (2009) 809−811.

[5] X. Cao, Y. Han, C. Gao, Y. Xu, X. Huang, M. Willander, N. Wang, Nano Energy 9 (2014) 301−308.

[6] W. F. Chen, K. Sasaki, C. Ma, A. I. Frenkel, N. Marinkovic, J. T. Muckerman, Y. Zhu, R. R. Adzic, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 51 (2012) 6131–6135.

[7] H. Yin, S. Zhao, K. Zhao, A. Muqsit, H. Tang, L. Chang, H. Zhao, Y. Gao, Z. Tang, Nat. Commun. 6 (2015) 6430.

highly active electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction- Advances in Engineering

About the author

Xiaobo Chen is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Missouri – Kansas City. His research interests include renewable energy, electrocatalysis, photocatalysis, nanomaterials, environment, etc. He has authors 90+ peer-reviewed articles with over 23,000+ citations. His discovery of the black TiO2 nanomaterials (published by Science 2011) is selected as one of the major advance in the field, and his recent publication on electrical water splitting with voltage as little as 0.8 V (published in Nano Energy) paved a new path than common catalyst design to solve the high voltage requirement of water splitting (>1.6 V). 

 

Journal Reference

Journal of Power Sources, Volume 300, 30 December 2015, Pages 336-343

Xiaodong Yan1, Lihong Tian1,2, Xiaobo Chen1 

[expand title=”Show Affiliations”]
  1. Department of Chemistry, University of Missouri − Kansas City, Kansas City, MO 64110, USA
  2. Hubei Collaborative Innovation Center for Advanced Organochemical Materials, Ministry-of-Education Key Laboratory for the Synthesis and Applications of Organic Functional Molecules, Hubei University, Wuhan, Hubei 430062, China [/expand]

Abstract

Novel crystalline/amorphous core/shell Ni/NiO nanosheets have shown a high electrocatalytic activity in hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). In 1 M KOH, they display an hydrogen evolution reaction current of 5 mA cm−2 at an overpotential of 110 mV with a good stability. It is proposed that their excellent hydrogen evolution reaction performance is achieved through the synergistic effect between the Ni core and the amorphous NiO shell, where the Ni core can reduce the resistance and the amorphous NiO shell can accelerate both Volmer and Heyrovsky processes to drive hydrogen evolution reaction at low overpotentials.

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