Platinum single-atom catalyst coupled with transition metal/metal oxide heterostructure for accelerating alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction

Single-atom catalysts provide an effective approach to reduce the amount of precious metals meanwhile maintain their catalytic activity. However, the sluggish activity of the catalysts for alkaline water dissociation has hampered advances in highly efficient hydrogen production. Herein, we develop a single-atom platinum immobilized NiO/Ni heterostructure (Pt-SA-NiO/Ni) as an alkaline hydrogen evolution catalyst. It is found that Pt single atom coupled with NiO/Ni heterostructure enables the tunable binding abilities of hydroxyl ions (OH*) and hydrogen (H*), which efficiently tailors the water dissociation energy and promotes the H* conversion for accelerating alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction. A further enhancement is achieved by constructing Pt-SA-NiO/Ni nanosheets on Ag nanowires to form a hierarchical three-dimensional morphology. Consequently, the fabricated Pt-SA-NiO/Ni catalyst displays high alkaline hydrogen evolution performances with a quite high mass activity of 20.6Amg(-1) for Pt at the overpotential of 100mV, significantly outperforming the reported catalysts. While H-2 evolution from water may represent a renewable energy source, there is a strong need to improve catalytic efficiencies while maximizing materials utilization. Here, authors examine single-atom Pt on nickel-based heterostructures as highly active electrocatalysts for alkaline H-2 evolution.