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Alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) has great potential in practical hydrogen production. However, constructing an excellent catalyst with advantages of both superior water dissociation ability and easy OH* desorption remains urgently needed and yet challenging for the alkaline HER. Herein, superior water dissociation process, facile OH* desorption, and optimized H adsorption are realized on a strongly coupled heterostructure of Ru@Mn3O4, in which Ru clusters are decorated on Mn3O4 via Ru─O─Mn bonds. The highly oxophilic Mn3O4 facilitates the water dissociation, whereas the formed heterointerface can efficiently desorb OH* via hydroxyl spillover effect and optimize H adsorption. Consequently, the Ru@Mn3O4 presents remarkable HER performance with a low overpotential of 17 mV at 10 mA cm-2 and Tafel slope of 30 mV dec-1, surpassing recently reported Ru-based catalysts and commercial Pt/C. More importantly, the mass activity (MA) and turnover frequency (TOF) of the Ru@Mn3O4 increase about 11- and 8-fold, respectively, compared to Pt/C at 100 mV in 1.0 M KOH. This study provides a new strategy for designing high-performance HER catalysts and enhancing the catalytic performance through hydroxyl spillover effect and sheds a light on understanding the HER mechanism.
Xu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.