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Rational design of stable sulfur vacancies in molybdenum disulfide for hydrogen evolution

Wednesday 05 Feb 20
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Sulfur (S) vacancies in MoS2 have been found to act as a new active center, which shows an unprecedented intrinsic HER activity under elastic strain. However, such S-vacancies are unstable and the activities are very sensitive to the vacancy concentration. A strategy to stabilize these abundant active sites is thus highly desirable. Herein, we rationally design a catalyst system to stabilize S-vacancies in the basal plane of 2H-MoS2 supported on defective vertical graphene network (VGN). 

The energetically favorable line-shaped S-vacancies in MoS2 show a consistently high HER activity that is insensitive to S-vacancy concentration. Moreover, the defective graphene support effectively stabilizes these S-vacancies. The optimized catalyst exhibits a superior HER activity with overpotential of 128 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and Tafel slope of 50 mV dec−1. Most importantly, the catalyst shows greatly increased stability over 500 h; benchmarking the most stable nonprecious HER catalyst in acidic media to date.

Zhao, Yunxing, Tang, Michael T., Wu, Sudong, Geng, Jing, Han, Zhaojun, Chan, Karen, Gao, Pingqi and Li, Hong

JOURNAL OF CATALYSIS, Volume: 382 Pages: 320-328

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