Developing cost-effective high-performance catalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) stands as a key issue for the utilization of hydrogen as a major energy carrier. While Pt may provide the best HER catalysis performance, it is too expensive and rare to be useful for massive production of hydrogen. MoS2 has been widely considered a promising low-cost alternative to Pt, but the catalytic performance of all the MoS2 materials reported to date is way worse than Pt. Here I will show our work on engineering MoS2 to have even better HER catalysis performance than Pt. This includes numerous new fundamental understanding on the HER catalysis of MoS2, including layer-dependence of the catalysis, the catalytic activities of sulfur vacancies, the effect of substrates, and the role of crystallinity. We rationally design the composition and structure as well as substrates of MoS2 following the guidance of the new understanding, and eventually develop MoS2 HER catalysts with an overpotential at 45 meV at 20mA/cm2, which is better than that of Pt.

MoS2 with better performance than Pt for hydrogen evolution

254th National Meeting (2017)

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