Improving hydrogen evolution reaction efficiency through lattice tuning

The intermittent nature of renewable energy sources sets a requirement for efficient energy storage to mitigate the conflict between energy supply and demand. Hydrogen is a promising choice for energy storage due to its high energy density. However, the conversion of electrical energy to chemical energy stored in hydrogen through water electrolysis suffers from low efficiency, and the electricity cost dominates the total cost of hydrogen production. Here, we report the study of improving the hydrogen evolution reaction activity of Pt-based catalysts by building a nanoscale surface NiO and Pt interface, further optimizing the performance via tuning the lattice parameter of the core of nanoparticles, which can be achieved by varying the dealloying annealing time. The optimized PtCuNi-O/C and PtNi-O/C catalysts are demonstrated to be one of the best catalysts, with a mass activity (MA) of 9.1 and 8.7 mA/µgPt, which is 9.9-fold and 9.5-fold of that of Pt/C, respectively.