Phase Engineering of Molybdenum Carbide/Oxide for Highly‐Efficient Electrocatalytic Hydrogen Production

Abstract

Molybdenum carbide is one of non‐precious metal materials and it is a promising electrocatalyst for hydrogen production. Synthesis and improvement of molybdenum carbide's catalytic performance is of great significance. Herein, carbon‐based Mo2C with hybrid phase of MoO2 was fabricated by matching the composition of Mo and C derived from pomelo peel and optimizing raw carbon amount and prolysis temperature. The resulting MoO2/Mo2C@C is composed of loose microspheres with mesoporous microstructure and is self‐assembled from nanoparticles. The results show that MoO2/Mo2C@C2 material exhibits excellent HER performance and only a low overpotentials of 143 mV is needed to drive the current density of 10 mA cm−2 in alkaline solution, and Tafel slopes are only 63.4 mV dec−1, respectively. Notably, it has potential application at low overpotentials to drive large current density and this strategy also provides a universal route to prepare non‐noble metal catalyst with hybrid phase of oxide/carbide.