Coral-Shaped MoS2 Decorated with Graphene Quantum Dots Performing as a Highly Active Electrocatalyst for Hydrogen Evolution Reaction

Bangjun Guo; Ke Yu; Honglin Li; Ruijuan Qi; Yuanyuan Zhang; Haili Song; Zheng Tang; Ziqiang Zhu; Mingwei Chen

doi:10.1021/acsami.6b14035

Coral-Shaped MoS₂ Decorated with Graphene Quantum Dots Performing as a Highly Active Electrocatalyst for Hydrogen Evolution Reaction

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2017 Feb 1;9(4):3653-3660. doi: 10.1021/acsami.6b14035. Epub 2017 Jan 18.

Authors

Bangjun Guo¹, Ke Yu¹, Honglin Li¹, Ruijuan Qi¹, Yuanyuan Zhang¹, Haili Song¹, Zheng Tang¹, Ziqiang Zhu¹, Mingwei Chen^{2

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Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Polar Materials and Devices (Ministry of Education of China), Department of Electronic Engineering, East China Normal University , Shanghai 200241, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Metal Matrix Composites, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University , Shanghai 200030, China.
³ WPI Advanced Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University , Sendai 980-8577, Japan.
⁴ CREST, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) , Saitama 332-0012, Japan.

PMID: 28060479
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.6b14035

Abstract

We report a new CVD method to prepare coral-shaped monolayer MoS₂ with a large amount of exposed edge sites for catalyzing hydrogen evolution reaction. The electrocatalytic activities of the coral-shaped MoS₂ can be further enhanced by electronic band engineering via decorated with graphene quantum dot (GQD) decoration. Generally, GQDs improve the electrical conductivity of the MoS₂ electrocatalyst. First-principles calculations suggest that the coral MoS₂@GQD is a zero-gap material. The high electric conductivity and pronounced catalytically active sites give the hybrid catalyst outstanding electrocatalytic performance with a small onset overpotential of 95 mV and a low Tafel slope of 40 mV/dec as well as excellent long-term electrocatalytic stability. The present work provides a potential way to design two-dimensional hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) electrocatalysts through controlling the shape and modulating the electric conductivity.

Keywords: coral shape; electrocatalysis; graphene quantum dots; hydrogen evolution reaction; monolayer molybdenum disulfide.