Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) has attracted extensive attention as a non-noble metal electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Controlling the skeleton structure at the nanoscale is paramount to increase the number of active sites at the surface. However, hydrothermal synthesis favors the presence of the basal plane, limiting the efficiency of catalytic reaction. In this work, perfect hollow MoS2 microspheres capped by hollow MoS2 nanospheres (hH-MoS2) were obtained for the first time, which creates an opportunity for improving the HER electrocatalytic performance. Benefiting from the controllable hollow skeleton structure and large exposed edge sites, high-efficiency HER activity was obtained for stacked MoS2 thin shells with a mild degree of disorder, proving the presence of rich active sites and the validity of the combined structure. In general, the obtained hollow micro/nano MoS2 nanomaterial exhibits optimized electrocatalytic activity for HER with onset overpotential as low as 112 mV, low Tafel slope of 74 mV decade(-1), high current density of 10 mA cm(-2) at η = 214 mV, and high TOF of 0.11 H2 s(-1) per active site at η = 200 mV.
Keywords: MoS2 hollow spheres; electrocatalysis; hydrogen evolution reaction; hydrothermal synthesis; micro/nano structure.