Growth of carbon nanotubes coated CoP as electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction under acidic and alkaline solutions

The development of phosphide-based electrocatalyst with excellent properties and good stability under both acidic and alkaline condition is the hotspot of recent research. Herein, we synthesized N doped CoP coated with carbon nanotubes (CoP@NC) electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), in which, the ZIF-67 (ZIF = zeolite imidazole skeleton) nanoparticles wrapped Co-MOF (MOF = metal-organic ske-leton) nanorods has been used as precursor. The improvement of catalytic performance of N-doped CoP can be attributed to the fact that the introduction of N can optimize the electronic structure and the in-situ grown carbon nanotubes can improve charge transfer rate and avoid the agglomeration of active units. In addition, the effect of phosphorization temperature and the amount of carbon nanotube on the electro-chemical activity of the samples were also investigated, and the obtained CoP@NCs only required low overpotential of 250 mV and 234 mV to drive the current density of 100 mA cm-2 under acidic and basic conditions, respectively. This work opens up an efficient paradigm for optimizing the performance of electrocatalysts.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

In this study, a N-doped CoP electrocatalyst coated with carbon nanotubes (CoP@NC) was successfully synthesized. By optimizing the electronic structure and improving the charge transfer rate, the catalyst exhibited excellent catalytic performance under both acidic and alkaline conditions, providing an efficient approach for optimizing electrocatalyst performance.