Rapid complete reconfiguration induced actual active species for industrial hydrogen evolution reaction

Abstract

Rational regulation of electrochemical reconfiguration and exploration of activity origin are important foundations for realizing the optimization of electrocatalyst activity, but rather challenging. Herein, we potentially develop a rapid complete reconfiguration strategy for the heterostructures of CoC ₂O ₄ coated by MXene nanosheets (CoC ₂O ₄@MXene) during the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) process. The self-assembled CoC ₂O ₄@MXene nanotubular structure has high electronic accessibility and abundant electrolyte diffusion channels, which favor the rapid complete reconfiguration. Such rapid reconfiguration creates new actual catalytic active species of Co(OH) ₂ transformed from CoC ₂O ₄, which is coupled with MXene to facilitate charge transfer and decrease the free energy of the Volmer step toward fast HER kinetics. The reconfigured components require low overpotentials of 28 and 216 mV at 10 and 1000 mA cm ⁻² in alkaline conditions and decent activity and stability in natural seawater. This work gives new insights for understanding the actual active species formation during HER and opens up a new way toward high-performance electrocatalysts.

Abstract

Rational regulation of electrochemical reconfiguration and exploration of activity origin are important for electrocatalysis. Here, a novel CoC ₂O ₄@MXene tubular catalyst is rationally designed to achieve rapid complete reconfiguration engineering during the hydrogen evolution reaction process.