Fabrication of highly efficient Rh-doped cobalt-nickel-layered double hydroxide/MXene-based electrocatalyst with rich oxygen vacancies for hydrogen evolution

Liang Yan; Dan Song; Jiayu Liang; Xinyi Li; Hao Li; Quanbing Liu

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2023.02.113

Fabrication of highly efficient Rh-doped cobalt-nickel-layered double hydroxide/MXene-based electrocatalyst with rich oxygen vacancies for hydrogen evolution

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2023 Jun 15:640:338-347. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2023.02.113. Epub 2023 Feb 28.

Authors

Liang Yan¹, Dan Song², Jiayu Liang², Xinyi Li², Hao Li², Quanbing Liu³

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemistry and Materials Engineering, Huizhou University, Huizhou 516007, China. Electronic address: yanliang@hzu.edu.cn.
² School of Chemistry and Materials Engineering, Huizhou University, Huizhou 516007, China.
³ Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Clean Transportation Energy Chemistry, School of Chemical Engineering and Light Industry, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China.

PMID: 36867930
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2023.02.113

Abstract

The development of nonprecious metal catalysts for producing hydrogen from economical alkaline water electrolysis that is both stable and efficient is crucial but remains challenging. In this study, Rh-doped cobalt-nickel-layered double hydroxide (CoNi LDH) nanosheet arrays with abundant oxygen vacancies (Ov) in-situ grown on Ti₃C₂T_x MXene nanosheets (Rh-CoNi LDH/MXene) were successfully fabricated. The synthesized Rh-CoNi LDH/MXene exhibited excellent long-term stability and a low overpotential of 74.6 ± 0.4 mV at -10 mA cm^-2 for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) owing to its optimized electronic structure. Experimental results and density functional theory calculations revealed that the incorporation of Rh dopant and Ov into CoNi LDH and the coupling interface between Rh-CoNi LDH and MXene optimized the hydrogen adsorption energy, which accelerated the hydrogen evolution kinetics, thereby accelerating the overall alkaline HER process. This work presents a promising strategy for designing and synthesizing highly efficient electrocatalysts for electrochemical energy conversion devices.

Keywords: DFT calculation; HER; MXene; Oxygen vacancies; Rh-doped CoNi LDH.