Vapor-assisted engineering heterostructure of 1D Mo3N2 nanorod decorated with nitrogen-doped carbon for rapid pH-Universal hydrogen evolution reaction

Reasonable construction of heterostructure is of significance yet a great challenge towards efficient pH-universal catalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Herein, a facial strategy coupling gas-phase nitridation with simultaneous heterogenization has been developed to synthesize heterostructure of one-dimensional (1D) Mo3N2 nanorod decorated with ultrathin nitrogen-doped carbon layer (Mo3N2@NC NR). Thereinto, the collaborative interface of Mo3N2 and NC is conducive to accomplish rapid electron transfer for reaction kinetics and weaken the Mo-H-ads bond for boosting the intrinsic activity of catalysts. As expected, Mo3N2@NC NR delivers an excellent catalytic activity for HER with low overpotentials of 85, 129, and 162 mV to achieve a current density of 10 mA cm(-2) in alkaline, acidic, and neutral electrolytes, respectively, and favorable long-term stability over a broad pH range. As for practical application in electrocatalytic water splitting (EWS) under alkaline, Mo3N2@NC NR parallel to NiFe-LDH-based EWS also exhibits a low cell voltage of 1.55 V and favorable durability at a current density of 10 mA cm(-2) , even surpassing the Pt/C parallel to RuO2 -based EWS (1.60 V). Consequently, the proposed suitable methodology here may accelerate the development of Mo-based electrocatalysts in pH-universal non-noble metal materials for energy conversion. (C) 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC.