Ni nanodendrites prepared by a low-temperature process as electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction in alkaline solution

Abstract It is essential to explore high catalytic activity and stability inexpensive metal electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) to achieve the hydrogen energy generation. Therefore, in this paper, we report a simple low-temperature method which is template-free and environmentally-friendly to fabricate the Ni nanodendrites (Ni NDs) manifesting the excellent HER catalytic performances. This method is a simple one-step reduction, and at 50 °C we obtain the Ni NDs50 that exhibit a low overpotential of 49 mV (10 mA cm−2) and a small Tafel slope of 32.70 mV dec−1 in 1.0 M KOH electrolyte. Besides, the Ni NDs50 exhibit the favorable stability for 22 h. The superior HER performance may be attributed to the exposure of more electrochemical surface areas due to the multiple branching dendrite structure. Hence, our research provides a simple method for large-scale preparing nickel-based electrocatalysts.