Recently, with Chen Guangliang (professor from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, School of Engineering) as the first corresponding author and Huzhou University as the first unit, a research paper entitled Fabric-like rhodium-nickel-tungsten oxide nanosheets for highly-efficient electrocatalytic H2 generation in an alkaline electrolyte has been carried on the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science (TOP Q1 Chinese Academy of Sciences, IF: 9.9), a renowned journal in the field of chemistry.

　　As a source of green and zero-carbon emission energy, hydrogen is expected to act as one of the main clean energy sources in the future. Presently, water electrolysis performed in an alkaline medium is considered as a suitable protocol to produce high-purity H2 gas, which promotes the development and widely application of hydrogen cells. However, developing high-performance electrode materials for industrial high current is still a technical problem in hydrogen production with electrolytic alkaline water. For the past few years, there have been some breakthroughs in the field of high-performance electrocatalytic electrode materials, but the electrocatalytic activity of the reported non-precious metal catalysts are still inferior to the noble-metal electrodes. Meanwhile, widespread industrialization of Pt-based electrocatalysts is severely restricted due to its insufficient reserves on earth. Therefore, it is urgent to explore cheap and high-performance electrocatalysts for a large-scale production of H2, aiming to contribute to the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals in China.

　　In response to the above problems, Prof. Chen and his team engineered the fibrous Rh2O3-NiWO4 nanosheets, a new type of high-efficiency hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) electrocatalyst, by using a plasma-assisted one-step hydrothermal approach. In this approach, air dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma was used to modify the cleaned plasma-treated nickel foam (PNF), which provided abundant reaction sites and strengthened the bonding strength between PNF and catalyst. Then, the two-phase heterostructure Rh2O3-NiWO4 was synthesized by one-step hydrothermal approach. Benefiting from rich active sites exposed on the heterostructure, Rh2O3-NiWO4/PNF catalyst exhibits superior HER activity. This is evidenced by the fact that the overpotentials of Rh2O3-NiWO4/PNF for delivering current densities of 10 (j10) and 1000 (j1000) mA cm?2 in 1.0 M KOH are merely 19 and 293 mV, respectively. Meanwhile, the small Tafel slope (18 mV dec?1) of the optimized catalyst manifests the fast HER kinetics. In addition, Rh2O3-NiWO4/PNF exhibits ultra-stable HER performance, and the current density (j100) only decrease 7.69 % after 100 h chronoamperometric curves (I-t) test. The theoretical results show that the Rh2O3-NiWO4 two-phase heterostructure has higher electron state density and lower ΔGH* near the Fermi level, showing better HER performance. This work provides a new approach for designing high-performance, low-cost transition metal oxide-based electrocatalytic electrode materials, which can be widely applied.

　　Paper link：https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcis.2024.01.060

　　Correspondent：Zhang Qun