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Published June 1, 2017 | Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Outstanding hydrogen evolution reaction catalyzed by porous nickel diselenide electrocatalysts

Abstract

To relieve our strong reliance on fossil fuels and to reduce greenhouse effects, there is an ever-growing interest in using electrocatalytic water splitting to produce green, renewable, and environment-benign hydrogen fuel via the hydrogen evolution reaction. For commercially feasible water electrolysis, it is imperative to develop electrocatalysts that perform as efficiently as Pt but using only earth-abundant commercial materials. However, the highest performance current catalysts consist of nanostructures made by using complex methods. Here we report a porous nickel diselenide (NiSe_2) catalyst that is superior for water electrolysis, exhibiting much better catalytic performance than most first-row transition metal dichalcogenide-based catalysts, well-studied MoS_2, and WS_2-based catalysts. Indeed NiSe2 performs comparably to the state-of-the-art Pt catalysts. We fabricate NiSe_2 directly from commercial nickel foam by acetic acid-assisted surface roughness engineering. To understand the origin of the high performance, we use first-principles calculations to identify the active sites. This work demonstrates the commercial possibility of hydrogen production via water electrolysis using porous bulk NiSe_2 catalysts.

Additional Information

© 2017 The Royal Society of Chemistry. Received 22nd March 2017; Accepted 17th May 2017; First published on 17th May 2017. This project was mainly funded by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under grant FA 7000-13-1-0001, and the US Department of Energy under a grant DE-SC0010831. J. S. and S. C. also acknowledge the support from TcSUH as the TcSUH Robert A. Welch Professorships in High Temperature Superconducting (HTSg) and Chemical Materials (E-0001). Y. L. acknowledges the support from Resnick Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship at Caltech. W. A. G. and Y. L. acknowledge support from NSF (CBET 1512759). The calculations were performed on PEREGRINE (NREL), XSEDE (NSF ACI-1053575), and NERSC (DOE DE-AC02-05CH11231). J. M. B. acknowledges the support from the National Science Foundation (CAREER Award ECCS-1240510) and the Robert A. Welch Foundation (E-1728).

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