Carbon doping switching on the hydrogen adsorption activity of NiO for hydrogen evolution reaction

Tianyi Kou, Mingpeng Chen, Feng Wu, Tyler J. Smart, Shanwen Wang, Yishang Wu, Ying Zhang, Shengtong Li, Supriya Lall, Zhonghua Zhang, Yi-Sheng Liu, Jinghua Guo, Gongming Wang (), Yuan Ping () and Yat Li ()
Additional contact information
Tianyi Kou: University of California
Mingpeng Chen: University of California
Feng Wu: University of California
Tyler J. Smart: University of California
Shanwen Wang: University of California
Yishang Wu: University of Science and Technology of China
Ying Zhang: Shandong University
Shengtong Li: University of California
Supriya Lall: University of California
Zhonghua Zhang: Shandong University
Yi-Sheng Liu: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Jinghua Guo: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Gongming Wang: University of Science and Technology of China
Yuan Ping: University of California
Yat Li: University of California

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is more sluggish in alkaline than in acidic media because of the additional energy required for water dissociation. Numerous catalysts, including NiO, that offer active sites for water dissociation have been extensively investigated. Yet, the overall HER performance of NiO is still limited by lacking favorable H adsorption sites. Here we show a strategy to activate NiO through carbon doping, which creates under-coordinated Ni sites favorable for H adsorption. DFT calculations reveal that carbon dopant decreases the energy barrier of Heyrovsky step from 1.17 eV to 0.81 eV, suggesting the carbon also serves as a hot-spot for the dissociation of water molecules in water-alkali HER. As a result, the carbon doped NiO catalyst achieves an ultralow overpotential of 27 mV at 10 mA cm−2, and a low Tafel slope of 36 mV dec−1, representing the best performance among the state-of-the-art NiO catalysts.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14462-2 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-14462-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14462-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().