Fudan University released on the 26th, the school's materials science department Wu Renbing, Fang Fang professor team in the high-efficiency non-precious metal hydrogen evolution electrocatalysts have made new progress, related research results recently published in the international journal "Advanced Materials."
Hydrogen energy is rich in raw materials, high in combustion value, and zero pollution. It is highly hoped by scientists and the public. To develop hydrogen energy technology, an indispensable step is to convert water into hydrogen by electrochemical reaction. This is the hydrogen evolution reaction. The required overpotential is high, and it is necessary to add a catalyst to reduce the overpotential and increase the reaction rate. At present, noble metal platinum is the most excellent catalyst, but it is difficult to enter the scale application. The transition metal elements such as iron, cobalt, nickel, catalysis There is still a big gap between the effect and platinum. The effect of this type of catalyst is not satisfactory.
The research team broke through the bottleneck of the development of high-activity hydrogen evolution reaction electrocatalysts using transition metal nanomaterials, and creatively prepared zero-dimensional cobalt nanoparticles, one-dimensional nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes and two-dimensional graphene coupling. Composite structural system to solve the problem that transition metals such as iron, cobalt and nickel nanoparticles have strong adsorption on hydrogen atoms and are not easy to desorb, particles are easy to agglomerate, low specific surface area, unstable under the operating environment of the electrolyte, etc. The research results of catalytic activity and stability close to that of noble metal platinum.
The system has high conductivity, rich porosity, high dispersion of cobalt nanoparticles and fully exposed active sites (cobalt-nitrogen-carbon), which acts as an electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction in acid and alkaline electrolytes. The hydrogen evolution catalytic activity is close to the noble metal platinum-based catalyst.
Experts said that the breakthrough in the study of hydrogen evolution electrocatalysts has not only promoted the optimization of electrolyzed water hydrogen production technology, but also provided the possibility of extracting higher purity hydrogen at a lower cost. The new results will be more scientific. Research provides a direction to replace expensive elements with cheap elements, and will have a far-reaching impact on the clean energy industry, especially the hydrogen energy utilization field.
