Decoration of Ru/RuO2 hybrid nanoparticles on MoO2 plane as bifunctional electrocatalyst for overall water splitting.

Abstract Hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are the two branches of artificial overall water splitting (OWS), in which the reaction efficiency usually depends on different specific catalysts. Although effective bifunctional electrocatalyst for OWS (HER and OER) are highly desired, designing and constructing such suitable materials is full of challenges to overcome several difficulties, involving slow kinetics, differences in catalytic mechanisms, large overpotential values, and low round-trip efficiencies. In this work, we reported a new bifunctional electrocatalyst Ru/RuO2-MoO2 catalyst (RRMC) via a redox solid phase reaction (RSPR) strategy to achieve the high electrocatalytic activity of OWS. Briefly, due to the restricted transport behavior of atoms in solid state precursor, the designed redox reaction occurred between the adjacent part of RuO2 and MoS2, forming Ru/RuO2 hybrid NPs and MoO2 plane. Therefore, the newly formed Ru/RuO2 hybrid NPs and MoO2 plane were tightly combined and used as an electrocatalyst for OWS. Benefiting from the exposed active sites and optimized electronic structure, the RRMC sample annealed at 500 °C (RRMC-500) exhibited low overpotential for HER (18 mV) and for OER (260 mV) at 10 mA cm−2 under alkaline conditions. Especially, a low cell voltage of 1.54 V was required at 10 mA cm−2 under alkaline condition.