Solar energy is a promising candidate of renewable energy sources owing to its gigantic capacity. Solar-driven water splitting to produce hydrogen is an attractive means to store solar energy in chemical forms. Thus, significant efforts have been devoted to developing efficient catalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Solid-state catalysts employing noble metals, such as platinum, have long been recognized as competent HER catalysts with low overpotential and great stability, however the associated scarce and high cost limit their application on a large scale. It remains a great challenge to develop inexpensive HER catalysts exhibiting both high efficiency and strong robustness in aqueous media. This talk will focus on exploring earth-abundant 1<sup>st</sup>-row transition metal chalcogenides and phosphides as competent HER catalysts in water. Facile electrochemical and microwave-assisted synthetic approaches were employed to produce various nano-structured chalcogenides and phosphides with low energy cost. A suite of characterization techniques were applied to study the composition and structure of these materials, as well as detailed electrochemical investigation on their HER catalytic performance. In particular, the intrinsic HER catalytic properties of several metal sulfides were carefully studied and compared, delineating the composition-structure-function relationship of 1<sup>st</sup>-row chalcogenides as HER catalysts. Our work will provide guidance for the rational design and development of improved and low-cost catalysts of hydrogen generation from water.

Exploring earth-abundant chalcogenides and phosphides for catalytic hydrogen generation from water

249th National Meeting (2015)

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