With the rising concerns on energy shortage, intensive efforts have been devoted to exploring renewable and green energy sources as alternatives to fossil fuels. Efficient catalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), oxygen evolution reaction (OER), and oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) are of great importance for electrochemical energy applications in fuel cells, batteries, and even electrochemical water splitting. To date, a variety of materials have been investigated for this purpose. Currently, open-framework semiconductor materials based on metal chalcogenide nanoclusters (MCNC) possessing a series of components have been widely investigated in photocatalysis and luminescence due to their semiconducting properties. However, such MCNC-based materials have never been studied as electrocatalysts for HER and ORR. In this case, we designed and fabricated the MCNC-based nanoparticles with a size of ~5 nm, which were loaded on the graphene to get stable MCNC@RGO hybrid materials. To the best of our knowledge, this is for the first time to create highly dispersed MCNC-based nanoparticles with such ultra-small size. Due to special structure and ultra-small size of such nanoparticles stabilized by RGO, the resulting hybrid materials exhibited an important enhancement in HER performance in alkaline solution compared to that of bulk MCNC-based semiconductor materials. The HER activity can be improved and tuned by synergistic effect of multiple metal components (such as Mn, Co and Fe) inserted in the nanocluster. Current study provides a new route to explore the MCNC-based materials in the application of electrocatalysis for renewable energy.

Stabilization of isolated metal chalcogenide nanoclusters and their electrocatalytic applications for hydrogen evolution reaction and oxygen reduction reaction

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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