Oxygen vacancy-assisted hydrogen evolution reaction of the Pt/WO3 electrocatalyst

Developing novel hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) catalysts with high activity, high stability and low cost is of great importance for the ever-broader applications of hydrogen energy. Among the conventionally used platinum-based heterogeneous catalysts, the high consumption but low utilization efficiency of precious platinum is one of the most crucial issues. Herein we present a facile approach to prepare an effective HER catalyst with platinum atom clusters highly dispersed in WO3@CFC (carbon fiber cloth). The fabricated Pt/def-WO3@CFC electrocatalyst shows an overpotential of 42 mV at 10 mA cm−2 for the HER in 0.5 M H2SO4, which is highly comparable to that of the state-of-the-art commercial Pt/C catalysts (34 mV), and more attractively, largely enhanced mass activity of Pt and excellent electrochemical stability compared to that of commercial Pt/C. The excellent HER performance of Pt/def-WO3@CFC is attributed to the synergetic catalytic effect between highly dispersed Pt atom clusters and WO3 nanoplates with oxygen vacancies, which enhances both electrocatalytic activity and durability.