Atomic ruthenium doping in collaboration with oxygen vacancy engineering boosts the hydrogen evolution reaction by optimizing H absorption

Development of cost effective and performance efficient catalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) holds great importance to advance a green future. In this work, atomic Ru doped NiMoO4 nanorod arrays with rich oxygen vacancy were tailor-synthesized on nickel foam. Both theoretical calculations and experiments elucidated the synergistic effects of Ru doping and oxygen vacancy engineering for the facilitating of H adsorption and water activation energy barrier reduction for water dissociation, which significantly enhanced the hydrogen evolution kinetics and thereby accelerated the water splitting process. The sample obtained exhibits a remarkably low overpotential of 49 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and a super robust stability, which is comparable to the performance of commercially available Pt/C and among one of the most efficient catalysts towards water splitting. Moreover, an integrated green energy-to-hydrogen device using sunlight, wind and thermal as the power sources was successfully built to prove the promising potential of the developed catalyst for the practical applications. This work provides a feasible strategy to prepare low-cost metal oxide electrocatalysts by noble element doping and oxygen vacancy engineering for efficient hydrogen evolution reaction.