Metal-support interface engineering for stable and enhanced hydrogen evolution reaction

Hydrogen has emerged as a green and sustainable pathway towards achieving global decarbonization and net-zero emissions, intensely driving the need for efficient hydrogen production protocols. Electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) holds great potential as a scalable, eco-friendly and safe avenue for efficient hydrogen production. However, the large-scale implementation of electrocatalytic HER is substantially challenged by the high-cost and unstable materials that are mainly fabricated from noble metals, e.g., Pt and Pd. Given this challenge, we adopted an interface engineering strategy to immobilize nanoscale Pt particles within the framework of nitrogen-doped CNTs, namely Pt@N-CNTs, where electronic metal-support interaction (EMSI) plays an important role in enabling orbital rehybridization and regulating the charge transfer through the metal-support interface, thereby considerably improving the electrocatalytic activity. With limited content of noble metals, our developed Pt@N-CNTs delivered superior HER performance with an ultralow overpotential of 5.8 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and demonstrated a high mass activity of 12.72 A mgPt−1 at an overpotential of 50 mV as well as excellent stability under harsh acidic conditions. At 500 mA cm−2, Pt@N-CNTs surprisingly exhibited an overpotential of 55.2 mV, outperforming that of commercial 20 wt% Pt/C catalysts (131.5 mV). Importantly, we established a straightforward, scalable, and time-saving microwave reduction strategy, alluding to its promising commercial viability. This work therefore sheds light on the development of high-performance electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution and water electrolysis.