Revealing the Contribution of Individual Factors to Hydrogen Evolution Reaction Catalytic Activity |
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Authors: | Yu Zhou Jose Luis Silva John M. Woods Joshua V. Pondick Qingliang Feng Zhixiu Liang Wen Liu Li Lin Bingchen Deng Barbara Brena Fengnian Xia Hailin Peng Zhongfan Liu Hailiang Wang Carlos Moyses Araujo Judy J. Cha |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA;2. Energy Sciences Institute, Yale West Campus, West Haven, CT, USA;3. Materials Theory Division, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden;4. Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Optical Information Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China;5. Chemistry Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, USA;6. Department of Chemistry, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA;7. College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, P. R. China;8. Department of Electrical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA |
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Abstract: | For the electrochemical hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), the electrical properties of catalysts can play an important role in influencing the overall catalytic activity. This is particularly important for semiconducting HER catalysts such as MoS2, which has been extensively studied over the last decade. Herein, on‐chip microreactors on two model catalysts, semiconducting MoS2 and semimetallic WTe2, are employed to extract the effects of individual factors and study their relations with the HER catalytic activity. It is shown that electron injection at the catalyst/current collector interface and intralayer and interlayer charge transport within the catalyst can be more important than thermodynamic energy considerations. For WTe2, the site‐dependent activities and the relations of the pure thermodynamics to the overall activity are measured and established, as the microreactors allow precise measurements of the type and area of the catalytic sites. The approach presents opportunities to study electrochemical reactions systematically to help establish rational design principles for future electrocatalysts. |
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Keywords: | 2D TMD materials electrochemical microreactors hydrogen evolution reaction individual factors overall performance |
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