Design of efficient transition metal-based electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction

Abstract

Electrochemistry is a foundation science addressing many environmental issues by shifting from fossil fuel to zero-carbon world. Many research groups are using electrochemistry principles to solve environmental challenges. To address these environmental and energy issues, a lot of efforts have been made using experimental and theoretical approaches. Among all the strategies, electrocatalytic water splitting is a chemically simple large-scale method and a convenient technique to generate clean H2. The desired electrocatalysts should exhibit high catalytic activity, durability, and minimum overpotential. Up to now, most of the electrocatalysts have minimum overpotential utilizing Pt/C photoanode, which is expensive to be used in practical markets. Transition metals (TMs) have attracted great interest from researchers because they have great thermal stability and many lone-pair electrons with unique electron orbital structures. Their sufficient number of lone pair electrons make them a good candidate for improving their intrinsic catalytic activity by shifting the d-band center. Unfortunately, their reported catalytic performance as TMs electrocatalysts for green H2 production can hardly be comparable to those of commercial catalysts. Until now, a lot of modifications have been studied, such as defect engineering, metal or non-metal doping, heterostructure and interface engineering, to improve their catalytic activities for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). In this thesis, both metal doping and adding LDH as co-catalyst have been adopted to modify performance of fabricated electrode.