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Activating interfacial S sites of MoS2 boosts hydrogen evolution electrocatalysis

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Abstract

The hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) is limited in alkaline and acid solution because the active sites are on the finite edge with extended basal plane remaining inert. Herein, we activated the interfacial S sites by coupling with Ru nanoparticles on the inert basal plane of MoS2 nanosheets. The density functional theory (DFT) calculation and experimental results show that the interfacial S electronic structure was modulated. And the results of ΔGH* demonstrate that the adsorption of H on the MoS2 was also optimized. With the advantage of interfacial S sites activation, the Ru-MoS2 needs only overpotential of 110 and 98 mV to achieve 10 mA·cm−2 in both 0.5 M H2SO4 and 1 M KOH solution, respectively. This strategy paves a new way for activating the basal plane of other transition metal sulfide electrocatalysts for improving the HER performance.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51871078 and 52071119) and Heilongjiang Science Foundation (No. E201808). The authors acknowledge the Beijing Super Cloud Computing Center (BSCC) for providing HPC resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper.

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  1. Shuo Geng and Fenyang Tian contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Space Environment and Physical Science, Research Center of Basic Space Science, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, China

    Shuo Geng, Jie Sheng & Weiwei Yang

  2. MIIT Key Laboratory of Critical Materials Technology for New Energy Conversion and Storage, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, China

    Shuo Geng, Fenyang Tian, Menggang Li, Weiwei Yang & Yongsheng Yu

  3. Analytical Instrumentation Center, State Key Laboratory of Coal Conversion, Institute of Coal Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Taiyuan, 030001, China

    Yequn Liu

  4. Beijing Key Laboratory for Magnetoelectric Materials and Devices (BKL-MMD), Beijing Innovation Center for Engineering Science and Advanced Technology (BIC-ESAT), School of Materials Science and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Yanglong Hou

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  1. Shuo Geng
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  2. Fenyang Tian
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  3. Menggang Li
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  4. Yequn Liu
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  6. Weiwei Yang
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  7. Yongsheng Yu
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Correspondence to Weiwei Yang, Yongsheng Yu or Yanglong Hou.

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Geng, S., Tian, F., Li, M. et al. Activating interfacial S sites of MoS2 boosts hydrogen evolution electrocatalysis. Nano Res. 15, 1809–1816 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-021-3755-7

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