Wrinkled Ni-doped Mo2C coating on carbon fiber paper: An advanced electrocatalyst prepared by molten-salt method for hydrogen evolution reaction

Abstract Synthesis of affordable electrocatalysts with high efficiency at low cost is crucial for large-scale water splitting. Molybdenum carbide (Mo 2 C) has been suggested to be a promising alternative to noble metal based electrocatalysts for water splitting. In this paper, we fabricated a nanotextured coating of wrinkled Ni-doped Mo 2 C on carbon fiber paper (CFP) from Ni, Mo and carbon black (CB) via a molten salt method. Such a novel electrocatalyst, denoted as Ni-Mo 2 C CB /CFP, shows an overpotential of 121.4, 209.3 and 426.4 mV to achieve a current density of 10, 20 and 50 mA cm −2 respectively in acidic medium. The hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance of other as-prepared CFP based electrodes (bare CFP, Mo 2 C/CFP, Mo 2 C CB /CFP, Ni-Mo 2 C/CFP and NiC x /CFP) also tested. We found that the addition of carbon black and the doping of Ni could significantly improve the electrocatalytic performance of Mo 2 C/CFP in terms of overpotential, Tafel slope and exchange current density. This work demonstrates a facile and scalable route using molten salt method for the synthesis of high-performance electrocatalysts from non-precious compounds on carbon materials.