Nanosheets assembling three-dimensional molybdenum disulfide nanospheres for efficient hydrogen evolution reaction

In this study, uniform MoS2 nanosheets assembling three-dimensional (3D) nanospheres (MoS2 NPs) are developed via a facile hydrothermal procedure with silica (SiO2) nanospheres as a template. The MoS2 NPs catalyst exhibits high hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance with low onset overpotential of 87.0 mV, and small Tafel slope of 48.8 mV dec(-1), which also exhibits excellent stability even after 30 h potential cycles. The superior HER activity is attributed to the unique 3D hierarchical structure, which provides enriched active edge sites and excellent electrical transport. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.