Development of inorganic-based nano-electrocatalysts for highly efficient water electrolysis

Abstract

Polymer electrolyte membrane water electrolysis (PEMWE) is regarded as commercial electrochemical water-splitting technology to produce clean and sustainable hydrogen fuel from renewable energy resources. But current PEMWE system requires the noble metal-based metal, such as Pt, Ir or Ru, as electrocatalysts, which limits the large-scale commercialization of PEMWE. Thus, developing cost-effective and highly active electrocatalysts is important to produce hydrogen fuel on a large scale. In this paper, we introduce our recent works to develop inorganic-based noble-metal reduction or noble-metal-free nano-electrocatalysts for highly efficient water electrolysis through various facile synthetic strategies. First is Pt/MoC hybrid nanoparticles by hybridization of MoC and Pt nanoparticles for noble-metal-reduced HER electrocatalysts. Second is nickel and phosphorus substituted (Co1-xNix)(S1-yPy)2/Graphene ((Co1-xNix)(S1-yPy)2/G) 3D nano-architecture, which consist of self-assembly of 2D nanosheet, by structure-engineering and composition-engineering. Thrid is CoP nanosheets which are self-supported on carbon fabric current collector.