Electrospinning Preparation of N, P Dual-Doped Molybdenum Carbide/Porous Carbon Fibers with Highly Improved Electrocatalytic Activity for Hydrogen Evolution Reaction
Yuning Zhang, Deyuan Kong, Lili Bo, Wenping Shi, Xiaolin Guan, Yunxia Wang, Zhibin Lei, Jinhui Tong
Abstract
In this work, N, P dual-doped molybdenum carbide/porous carbon fiber composites were simply fabricated through electrospinning technology, followed by pyrolysis. The obtained samples were composed of N, P-doped MoC, Mo2C, and porous carbon fibers. Compared with each moiety, the composited samples have exhibited greatly improved electrocatalytic activities for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). As a result, the optimized MoxC-NPC-1.0-800 catalyst exhibits only 125/71 mV of overpotential at 10 mA·cm–2 and superior stability in 0.5 M H2SO4 and 1.0 M KOH, respectively, which outperforms most of the reported analogous catalysts. In addition, a theoretical simulation has confirmed that N, P doping can significantly reduce |ΔGH*| for hydrogen adsorption of MoC and Mo2C and consequently enhance the electrocatalytic activity of the catalysts for HER greatly. This work provides a convenient avenue for fabricating highly efficient composite electrocatalysts of nonmetallic element doped metallic carbide and graphitic carbon.