Accelerating the Hydrogen Production via Modifying the Fermi Surface

Jiarui Yang; Chenxi Zhu; Chang-Jie Yang; Wen-Hao Li; He-Yang Zhou; Shengdong Tan; Xiangwen Liu; Daping He; Dingsheng Wang

doi:10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c04138

Accelerating the Hydrogen Production via Modifying the Fermi Surface

Nano Lett. 2023 Dec 13;23(23):11368-11375. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c04138. Epub 2023 Dec 4.

Authors

Jiarui Yang¹, Chenxi Zhu¹, Chang-Jie Yang², Wen-Hao Li¹, He-Yang Zhou², Shengdong Tan³, Xiangwen Liu⁴, Daping He⁵, Dingsheng Wang¹

Affiliations

¹ Engineering Research Center of Advanced Rare Earth Materials, Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
² State Key Laboratory for Chemistry and Molecular Engineering of Medicinal Resources, School of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin 541004, China.
³ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 119077 Singapore.
⁴ Institute of Analysis and Testing, Beijing Academy of Science and Technology (Beijing Center for Physical and Chemical Analysis), Beijing 100094, China.
⁵ Hubei Engineering Research Center of RF-Microwave Technology and Application, School of Science, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China.

PMID: 38047597
DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c04138

Abstract

The design of catalysts has attracted a great deal of attention in the field of electrocatalysis. The accurate design of the catalysts can avoid an unnecessary process that occurs during the blind trial. Based on the interaction between different metal species, a metallic compound supported by the carbon nanotube was designed. Among these compounds, RhFeP₂C_X (R-RhFeP₂C_X-CNT) was found to be in a rich-electron environment at the Fermi level (denoted as a flat Fermi surface), beneficial to the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). R-RhFeP₂C_X-CNT exhibits a small overpotential of 15 mV at the current density of 10 mA·cm^-2 in acidic media. Moreover, the mass activity of R-RhFeP₂C_X-CNT is 21597 A·g^-1, which also demonstrates the advance of the active sites on R-RhFeP₂C_X-CNT. Therefore, R-RhFeP₂C_X-CNT can be an alternative catalyst applied in practical production, and the strategies of a flat Fermi surface will be a reliable strategy for catalyst designing.

Keywords: Fermi surface; electrocatalysis; hydrogen evolution reaction; metallic compound.