Pt Nanodendrites With (111) Crystalline Facet As An Efficient, Stable And Ph-Universal Catalyst For Electrochemical Hydrogen Production

High-performance nanomaterial catalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction via electrochemical water splitting are significant to the development of hydrogen energy. In this work, we report a robust and highly active catalyst fabricated through direct electrochemical deposition of Pt nanodendrites at the surface of activated carbon (Pt NDs). Owing to the large electrochemically active area and the exposed (111) facet of Pt, Pt NDs exhibits outstanding activity towards hydrogen evolution reaction with a low requiring overpotential of 0.027 V at 10 mA/cm(2) and Tafel slope of 22 mV/dec in acidic media. In addition, the hydrogen yield of Pt NDs is 30%-45% larger than that of commercial Pt/C at the same Pt loadings. Moreover, Pt NDs exhibits excellent long-term durability whose hydrogen production efficiency remains unchanged after six-hour hydrogen production, while the efficiency of commercial Pt/C catalyst decayed 9% under the same circumstance. Considering the superiority of catalytic activity and stability, this Pt NDs present great potentiality towards practical hydrogen production application. (C) 2020 Chinese Chemical Society and Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.