Effect of carbon-based carriers on HER performance of NiMo-based polyalloy catalysts†

Abstract

NiMo-based polyalloy catalysts are non-precious metal-based high-entropy alloy catalysts that have been extensively studied in recent years. They exhibit superior electrochemical performance in electrocatalytic water splitting for hydrogen production, and the combination of NiMo-based polyalloy catalysts with carbon black substrates is expected to produce better electrochemical supports. In this paper, we prepared a series of carbon-based high-entropy heterogeneous material catalysts using zero-dimensional carbon black, one-dimensional carbon nanotubes and two-dimensional graphene as substrates, respectively. Analytical results through the structural characterization of the synthesized materials as well as electrochemical tests revealed that carbon black, which is in the form of nanoparticles, can be more tightly wrapped with Ni shells compared to tubular nanotubes and flake graphene, which can effectively increase the number of active sites, thus promoting the outstanding performance of the zero-dimensional carbon-based transition metal nanomaterial catalysts NiMoCoMnLa/CB@Ni in the alkaline electrocatalytic hydrogen precipitation reaction. Driven by these findings, this work may provide new ideas for the pathway of rationally designing zero-dimensional carbon-based high-entropy alloy nanoparticle catalysts as efficient electrocatalysts in green hydrogen production processes.