Search

Ni/Mo 2 C hetero-sheet arrays are grown vertically on nickel foam skeleton to utilize the advantages of Ni and Mo 2 C on promotion of HER kinetics and 3D structure on mass transfer and accessibility and only 151 and 271 mV overpotentials are needed to deliver 100 and 1000 mA/cm2 HER, respectively. [Display omitted] • Ni-doped Mo 2 C nanosheet arrays are grown vertically on nickel foam skeleton. • Polyvinylpyrrolidone is used as soft template for catalyst preparation. • 151 and 271 mV overpotentials are needed to deliver 100 and 1000 mA/cm2 HER. • The HER can stably operate for more than 500 h. Practical structural design and electronic regulation are significant for synthesising efficient electrocatalysts. Therefore, a facile soft-template approach has been applied to successfully grow Ni/Mo 2 C heterojunction nanosheet arrays on nickel foam (NF) skeleton (NS-Ni/Mo 2 C@NF) using polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) as a soft template. The density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that abundant Ni/Mo 2 C heterojunction in NS-Ni/Mo 2 C@NF can provide many active sites with a moderate hydrogen adsorption free energy (ΔG H* , 0.037 eV). Benefiting from this nanosheet array structure and abundant Ni/Mo 2 C heterojunctions, the NS-Ni/Mo 2 C@NF catalyst can efficiently catalyze HER, especially at large current densities. As a result, only 151 and 271 mV overpotentials are needed to deliver 100 and 1000 mA/cm2 HER, respectively. More importantly, the hydrogen production testing with NS-Ni/Mo 2 C@NF as the working electrode can run stably for 500 h without activity decay under the current density of 500 mA/cm2 commonly used in industrial water electrolyzers, indicating that NS-Ni/Mo 2 C@NF has broad application prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]