Neutral electrochemical water splitting is an environmentally benign method to obtain hydrogen directly from water, which is highly desired but still in challenge since hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) under neutral condition suffers from sluggish kinetics. In this work, a novel 10 %wt Ir/W₁₈O₄₉ nanowire catalyst was developed to enhance the performance of HER under neutral medium by using tungsten oxide as support. It is found that tungsten oxide support endows better electron transfer capability contributing to faster kinetics, and more importantly tungsten oxide could effectively accelerate dissociation of the water molecule step promoting Volmer step to favor the subsequent reaction on Ir active sites. Consequently, enhanced activity with overpotential of 83 mV at 10 mA cm⁻² was achieved for neutral HER. Meanwhile, an interesting “proton container” property was found in the tungsten oxide support, which could release protons at the beginning of reaction to enable HER via acidic pathway achieving improved performance.

中性电化学水分解是一种直接从水中获得氢气的环境友好方法，这是非常需要但仍面临挑战的，因为中性条件下的析氢反应（HER）动力学缓慢。在这项工作中，通过使用氧化钨作为载体，开发了一种新型的 10%wt Ir/W ₁₈ O ₄₉纳米线催化剂，以提高中性介质下 HER 的性能。发现氧化钨载体赋予了更好的电子转移能力，有助于更快的动力学，更重要的是氧化钨可以有效地加速水分子步骤的解离，促进 Volmer 步骤，有利于 Ir 活性位点上的后续反应。因此，在 10 mA cm 处具有 83 mV 过电位的增强活性中性HER达到^-2。同时，在氧化钨载体中发现了一种有趣的“质子容器”特性，它可以在反应开始时释放质子，使 HER 通过酸性途径实现性能提高。