Titanium Dioxide and N-Doped Carbon Hybrid Nanofiber Modulated Ru Nanoclusters for High-Efficient Hydrogen Evolution Reaction Electrocatalyst.

ABSTRACT

The designing and fabricating highly active hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) electrocatalysts that can superior to Pt/C is extremely desirable but challenging. Herein, the fabrication of Ru/TiO2/N-doped carbon (Ru/TiO2/NC) nanofiber is reported as a novel and highly active HER electrocatalyst through electrospinning and subsequent pyrolysis treatment, in which Ru nanoclusters are dispersed into TiO2/NC hybrid nanofiber. As a novel support, experimental and theoretical calculation results reveal that TiO2/NC can more effectively accelerate water dissociation as well as optimize the adsorption strength of *H than TiO2 and NC, thus leading to a significantly enhanced HER activity, which merely requires an overpotential of 18 mV to reach 10 mA cm-2, outperforming Pt/C in an alkaline solution. The electrolytic cell composed of Ru/TiO2/NC nanofiber and NiFe LDH/NF can generate 500 and 1000 mA cm-2 at voltages of 1.631 and 1.753 V, respectively. Furthermore, the electrolytic cell also exhibits remarkable durability for at least 100 h at 200 mA cm-2 with negligible degradation in activity. The present work affords a deep insight into the influence of support on the activity of electrocatalyst and the strategy proposed in this research can also be extended to fabricate various other types of electrocatalysts for diverse electrocatalytic applications.