Atomically isolated nickel species anchored on graphitized carbon for efficient hydrogen evolution electrocatalysis

Hydrogen production through electrochemical process is at the heart of key renewable energy technologies including water splitting and hydrogen fuel cells. Despite tremendous efforts, exploring cheap, efficient and durable electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution still remains as a great challenge. Here we synthesize a nickel–carbon-based catalyst, from carbonization of metal-organic frameworks, to replace currently best-known platinum-based materials for electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution. This nickel-carbon-based catalyst can be activated to obtain isolated nickel atoms on the graphitic carbon support when applying electrochemical potential, exhibiting highly efficient hydrogen evolution performance with high exchange current density of 1.2mAcm 2 and impressive durability. This work may enable new opportunities for designing and tuning properties of electrocatalysts at atomic scale for largescale water electrolysis.

Journal Title

Nature Communications

Volume

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10667

Copyright Statement

© The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Subject

Nanotechnology not elsewhere classified

Publication URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10072/142473

Collection

Journal articles