Amorphous/Crystalline Rh(OH)₃/CoP Heterostructure with Hydrophilicity/Aerophobicity Feature for All-pH Hydrogen Evolution Reactions

Interface engineering shows distinct advantages in the electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) due to the unique structures that can be realized. The interfaces formed by amorphous materials often exhibit special properties that are beneficial for the HER. Herein, an amorphous/crystalline Rh(OH)(3)/CoP heterostructure is constructed, which exhibits outstanding HER performance in the all-pH range. It only needs the overpotentials of 13, 12, and 25 mV to drive a current density of 10 mA cm(-2) in alkaline, acidic, and neutral media, respectively, which ranks as one of the best HER electrocatalysts reported recently. The outstanding HER activities in the all-pH range are attributed to the unique amorphous/crystalline heterostructure of Rh(OH)(3)/CoP, which possesses special hydrophilic/aerophobic features thataccelerate mass transfer, and provide abundant exposed active sites and appropriate defects. Importantly, the performance attenuation mechanism of the catalyst is also revealed, i.e., the formation of Rh aggregations leads to poor contact and efficacy loss of the amorphous/crystalline interface for HER. In short, this work provides a new idea for using amorphous/crystalline heterostructure to design electrocatalysts, not only for the HER, but also for the oxygen reduction and oxygen evolution reactions.