Engineering Phase Stability of Semimetallic MoS2 Monolayers for Sustainable Electrocatalytic Hydrogen Production

Kunkun Nie; Xiaoyan Qu; Dongwei Gao; Binjie Li; Yanling Yuan; Qi Liu; Xinghua Li; Shaokun Chong; Zhengqing Liu

doi:10.1021/acsami.2c01358

Engineering Phase Stability of Semimetallic MoS₂ Monolayers for Sustainable Electrocatalytic Hydrogen Production

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2022 May 4;14(17):19847-19856. doi: 10.1021/acsami.2c01358. Epub 2022 Apr 20.

Authors

Kunkun Nie¹, Xiaoyan Qu², Dongwei Gao¹, Binjie Li¹, Yanling Yuan¹, Qi Liu³, Xinghua Li⁴, Shaokun Chong¹, Zhengqing Liu¹

Affiliations

¹ Frontiers Science Center for Flexible Electronics, Institute of Flexible Electronics (IFE), Xi'an Institute of Biomedical Materials and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710129, China.
² Frontier Institute of Science and Technology, State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xian Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China.
³ School of Faculty of Materials, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, China.
⁴ School of Physics, Northwest University, Xi'an 710127, China.

PMID: 35441503
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.2c01358

Abstract

1T'-phase MoS₂ possesses excellent electrocatalytic performance, but due to the instability of the thermodynamic metastable phase, its actual electrocatalytic effect is seriously limited. Here, we report a wet-chemical synthesis strategy for constructing rGO/1T'-MoS₂/CeO₂ heterostructures to improve the phase stability of metastable 1T' phase MoS₂ monolayers. Importantly, the rGO/1T'-MoS₂/CeO₂ heterostructure exhibits excellent electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance, which is much better than the 1T'-MoS₂ monolayers. The synergistic effects between CeO₂ nanoparticles (NPs) and 1T'-MoS₂ monolayers were systematically investigated. 1T'-MoS₂ monolayers combined with the cocatalyst of CeO₂ NPs can produce lattice strain and distortion on 1T'-MoS₂ monolayers, which can tune the energy band structure, charge transfer, and energy barriers of hydrogen atom adsorption (ΔE_H), leading to promotion of the phase activity and stability of 1T'-MoS₂ monolayers for hydrogen production. Our work offers a feasible method for the preparation of efficient HER electrocatalysts based on the engineering phase stability of metastable materials.

Keywords: 1T′ phase MoS2; CeO2 nanoparticle; heterostructure; hydrogen production; phase stability.