N-doping porous carbon with CoP loading for hydrogen evolution reaction

Abstract

Because of clean-burning, highly efficient, and abundant resources, hydrogen has attracted more and more attention. To develop new technologies for hydrogen production, electro-catalysis and photocatalysis are applied to the hydrogen production field. The catalyst plays a vital role in the electro-catalysis process. Recently, transition metal phosphides with high catalytic performance, low electrochemical impedance, and simple preparation methods have been widely reported for hydrogen evolution reaction applications. In this work, N-doping porous carbon with CoP loading is obtained through a sol-gel method. Phytic acid is used to phosphate the metal compounds and to dissolve the chitosan for N-doping porous carbon synthesis. The as-prepared catalyst exhibited an outstanding catalytic performance with a low overpotential, 120 mV at 10 mA cm–2, and a small Tafel slope value, 105 mV dec−1. Meanwhile, this catalyst also kept good stability for a long time test. This result indicates that the sol-gel method adopting biomass and phytic acid can prepare novel catalysts to improve the catalytic performance for hydrogen evolution reactions.