Heteroatom coordination induces electric field polarization of single Pt sites to promote hydrogen evolution activity

Xianyun Peng; Haihong Bao; Jiaqiang Sun; Zhiyong Mao; Yuan Qiu; Zhaojun Mo; Longchao Zhuo; Shusheng Zhang; Jun Luo; Xijun Liu

doi:10.1039/d1nr00795e

Heteroatom coordination induces electric field polarization of single Pt sites to promote hydrogen evolution activity

Nanoscale. 2021 Apr 21;13(15):7134-7139. doi: 10.1039/d1nr00795e. Epub 2021 Apr 1.

Authors

Xianyun Peng¹, Haihong Bao, Jiaqiang Sun, Zhiyong Mao, Yuan Qiu, Zhaojun Mo, Longchao Zhuo, Shusheng Zhang, Jun Luo, Xijun Liu

Affiliation

¹ Institute for New Energy Materials and Low-Carbon Technologies and Tianjin Key Lab for Photoelectric Materials & Devices, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tianjin University of Technology, Tianjin 300384, China. xjliu@tjut.edu.cn.

PMID: 33889881
DOI: 10.1039/d1nr00795e

Abstract

Herein, we reported a kind of single Pt site (Pt-SA) stabilized on an MXene support (Pt-SA/MXene) via the formation of Pt-O and Pt-Ti bonds to effectively catalyze the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Due to the local electric field polarization derived from its unique asymmetric coordination, Pt-SA/MXene displays remarkably higher catalytic HER activity in an alkaline electrolyte. In detail, the Pt-SA/MXene electrocatalyst only needs a low overpotential of 33 mV to reach a current density of 10 mA cm^-2 and maintains the performance over 27 h. Besides, Pt-SA/MXene also has a competitive mass activity, 23.5 A mg_Pt^-1, at an overpotential of 100 mV, which is 29.4 times greater than that of the commercial Pt/C counterpart. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations revealed that the polarized electric field could efficiently tailor the electronic structure of Pt-SA/MXene and reduce the energy barrier of adsorption/desorption of the H* intermediate step, further improving its HER catalytic activity.